"Everybody, even my wife, thinks I'm crazy," says Saran, "but my passion is golf. I know I can make it."
I don't need to ask where to aim on the 1st tee at the KGA (Karnataka Golf Association) Golf Course in downtown Bangalore. Only a blind man couldn't see the huge neon IBM sign atop the glass office building behind the 1st green. Nor do I have to ask where not to aim. There's a neon Microsoft sign atop the glass building to the right of the green, and a shot hit in that direction is OB.
"The history of KGA epitomizes the transformation of Bangalore," says Krishnakumar Natarajan, the CEO of Mindtree, a software consulting company, as we stroll down the 1st fairway. Also designed by Thomson, the fivetime British Open champ from Australia, KGA is a flat 6,786-yard par-72 layout on what used to be guava and coconut fields owned by the city. In the mid-1980s some golfers cajoled city fathers to lease them the land for a rupee (a little more than two cents) per acre a year.
"Sounds like an anti-Robin Hood story," I say.
Natarajan, a 22 handicapper who took up golf three years ago, smiles. "Things like that happen a lot in India," he says.
The gleaming five-million-square-foot office park to the right of KGA's first five holes is on terrain that also used to be farmland. It was owned by an indigent mute who collected errant golf balls and sold them to players through a chain-link fence. "That man is rich now," says Natarajan. "A developer paid him $2 million in the late 1990s."
Hearing such stories is more than half the fun of playing golf in India. On the 4th tee I ask my partners about the towering floodlights on the course.
"Some guys here want night golf, so suddenly these lights appeared," says Ramesh Rao, a high-tech headhunter playing with us. "The project cost half a million bucks."
"How did the club pay for that?" I wonder.
"We offered 15 corporate memberships at $50,000 each," says Rao. "They sold out immediately."
"How often do you use the lights?"
"Never," says Rao.
"Why not?"
"The airport authority hasn't given permission," Rao says. "They think it's unsafe because we're right next to the airport. But a lot of the pilots are golfers, so we're working out that issue."
I thought I had seen the world's most hellacious road while driving into Bangalore from the airport. Then Kanishka Saran drives me and his father, Amit, to Amit's driving range. The last five miles are two lanes of mud littered with boulders, trees, garbage and potholes.
"Forgive the appearance," says Kanishka. "We just had our wettest month ever — more than 20 inches of rain."
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