BANGALORE : The rooftop terrace at Cosmo Village was crowded with young partygoers savoring the temperate night air, oversize Kingfisher beers, and their place in this moment of global economic convergence.

At one table, five friends from Singapore sat with a 6-foot-3, 23-year-old anomaly: Joshua Bornstein, the only native-born American among 25,000 Bangalore-based employees of Infosys Technologies, one of India’s software and services giants, and one of the few Americans of his generation in Bangalore.

For all the complaints about American jobs migrating here through outsourcing, few Americans have thought to follow them. Seven months ago, Bornstein did.

He quit his job at an investment banking firm in Los Angeles and came to this southern city on the Deccan plateau. He pays $110 a month to share a two-bedroom apartment with a Japanese roommate. He takes the company bus to work at the Infosys campus, as lush and large as Microsoft’s in Seattle. He has Indian, European, Israeli and Asian friends, and he has become a familiar figure on this city’s thriving pub scene.

“Everyone talks about globalization left and right,” he said. “This is the way the world is moving.”

Perhaps so, but he is the only one of his friends in the United States who even considered going to India for work after college. He has become a member of a cosmopolitan village that has formed as multinational companies flock here, and Indian companies try to become multinationals.

The city is full of foreigners –– 10,000 to 12,000 are registered here with the government’s office of foreign registration. At some bars, the crowds are so mixed they look as if they could be in London.

Bornstein works 10- to 12-hour days, but lives well. His salary is less than a third of what he earned in Los Angeles but he is still able to save a few hundred dollars a month and afford the Champagne Brunch at the Leela.

(By Permission, The New York Times)