City in a Bottle: How Bangalore’s liquor industry has shaped the city’s destiny for more than a century
ELCOME TO THE SKY.”
The elevator doors bing open at the 16th floor and the liftman, a pair of furred ears pinned to a sunken chest, mumbles this as you step out. You’re at the Skyye Bar, standing above a shining colossus of shops and clubs and lifts and executive offices and a luxury car wash and escalators and lots more lifts. You’re at the top of the city of Bangalore.
The only things above you are a helipad and, slightly higher, a great blue sign on the brow of a second tower. This tower has a tall spire, and a stocky body that seems too short by comparison, like a pygmy Empire State Building. On the sign, the top half is a neon-blue Pegasus, winging upward into the orange fuzz of the city’s night sky. The lower half says “UB”. Of course—all around you is UB City.
Skyye Bar occupies one of the terraces of UB City, a monumental, million-square-foot complex owned by Prestige builders and the United Breweries Group. For 100 years, there had been an actual brewery here, and other low-lying company buildings. Then in 2004, the earth thundered and a marble mountain broke through, pushing up gleaming new peaks and plateaus of commerce, and a spired tower, and Skyye Bar.
The wind pushes steadily across the rooftop bar, revising the hairdos of some of the young women who sit by the edge of the terrace. The glowing floor panels shine through their cocktails and light their chins blue and purple. There aren’t many people here, but a social murmur from below suggests that the wind gusted most of the patrons right off the roof, and set them down like feathers on the balcony of another bar, Shiro, a few floors down. Shiro is always packed. On the balcony, the red points of cigarettes dart between silk scarves and silky elbows, everyone asks everyone else, “What’re you drinking?”, and night after night they return, as fixed as the giant bodhisattva statues above them.