Bangalore may be India's Silicon Valley, but it ain't all business. Outside the city lie wildlife parks reminiscent of Africa and lush coffee plantations where the country's newly minted millionaires unplug. Shoba Narayan quits the urban jungle for the real deal

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Bangalore is home. I didn't always live here—until two years ago I lived in New York. But now this is the city where my kids go to school, where I hail auto rickshaws for bone-rattling yet perversely exciting rides to work and meetings, where I prowl pubs and malls in search of stories and sales, and where I go to Namdharis Fresh supermarket to buy organic grapes, too-hard bagels, and much-too-soft cream cheese in an attempt to replicate the Sunday morning brunches at my Upper West Side apartment.

Turns out that Bangalore, the capital of the southern state of Karnataka, is also home to some twenty thousand expats who work for Citibank, General Electric, Honeywell, Philips, Texas Instruments, and hundreds of other multinationals. The numbers are small compared with, say, Hong Kong, which has an estimated seventy thousand expats, but foreigners are thronging Bangalore at a rate that is alarming locals. "Are we being Bangalored in Bangalore?" screamed a recent headline, alluding to the growing number of local jobs being taken by foreigners. Eager for international experience, hundreds of freshly minted American MBAs sign on with Indian IT firms. One of them, Nate Linkon, keeps a blog detailing his transition from Milwaukee to Bangalore.

But it isn't just the techies. Two new Indian airlines, Air Deccan and Kingfisher, are headquartered in Bangalore and are expanding rapidly. With an acute shortage of Indian pilots, they have resorted to hiring Australians, Brits, and Russians, leading to incongruous accents on domestic flights. French and Belgian chefs headline many city hotels. The man overseeing the building of Bangalore's ambitious new international airport is Swiss. My yoga teacher is from Iran, my daughter's piano teacher is from Hungary, and one of the reasons I go for a haircut at Talking Headz, on busy Brigade Road, is to get a jolt of stylist Seth Lombardi's Brooklyn accent.

Besides the foreigners who live and work in Bangalore, thousands fly in every day for meetings and conferences or to clinch a deal. They stay at one of the city's pricey hotels, savor its pubs, buy sandalwood oil and silk scarves, and drive to Electronic City for their meetings. In fact, if you only take in the glass-and-steel high-rises of South Bangalore and ignore the beggars, flower sellers, squeegee men, vegetable vendors, and holy cows, it is possible to imagine that you are driving through California's Silicon Valley. The banners come quick and bold—Cisco Systems, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo—and together they give this city its rather uninspired moniker: India's Silicon Valley.