In terms of ancestry, I am a fourth-generation resident of Bengaluru. My paternal great-grandfather moved here in the 19th century from a village in the Thanjavur district to become a lawyer. His children were raised and educated in this town, as were their children, among them my father, who studied at St Joseph’s College and later at the Indian Institute of Science.

On my mother’s side, the connection with the city goes back to 1962, when her parents settled here in retirement, taking at face value the then current representation of the place as both a “non-fan station” and a “pensioner’s paradise”.

My family connection to Bengaluru thus goes back 150 years. However, I myself grew up in Dehradun, while coming down south every other summer to spend time with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Although my wife (also of Tamil extraction) spent her own childhood in Bengaluru, we moved here to live only in 1995. I can now thus claim 30 years of continuous residence, a period in which the city has undergone some profound transformations, of which the change in its name (from Bangalore to Bengaluru) may be the least consequential.

On the other side, some things have remained constant, such as the temperate climate, the glories of Lal Bagh and Cubbon Park, and the quality and diversity of its bookstores. And also, perhaps, the broadly welcoming and non-chauvinistic character of the majority of the city’s residents.

To celebrate these three decades of becoming a Bengalurian, I shall devote this column to three remarkable residents of this city. I begin with someone who came here from a city that was then known as Calcutta. His name is Biren Das, and he belongs to a celebrated family of confectioners. In the early 1970s, his father, who ran KC Das and Company, decided that, in light of the West Bengal government’s stringent control of the supply of milk, it would be prudent to open an outlet outside the state.

So Biren, then in his late twenties, was sent to start and run the Bangalore branch of KC Das, housed from the beginning at the corner of Church Street and St Mark’s Road. (That........

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