in one of my previous travels by this [...]]]> had the distinct opportunity of traveling with my brother via the Rajadhani Express from hyderabad to bangalore. an overnight journey that is supposed to be a pleasant relaxing experience at a price that is comparable to flying. but here’s what we got. check out the photos in full view.

in one of my previous travels by this train, i have seen rats in the coaches, sometimes jumping on to sleeping people. it’s quite pitiful where railways is headed.

i’d say why bother. i know flying takes a ton of overhead time/money, but this is downright filthy experience.

only played (flag) football once, but it’s like the ball carrier in NFL (american football). here are some fundas that directly apply (my gyaan from john madden and al michaels).

it may be the widespread spend-culture, plethora of brands or may be my myopic view of the few places i frequent. as my professor at IIMB puts it, india has 350M middle-class population in india that can afford most of the good brands out [...]]]> a little trust, a ton of service, and one suffocating crowd after another.

it may be the widespread spend-culture, plethora of brands or may be my myopic view of the few places i frequent. as my professor at IIMB puts it, india has 350M middle-class population in india that can afford most of the good brands out there. and with GDP growth rate pegged at 9%, nobody is feeling bashful about spending what they earn.

and it shows. any decent retail outlet worth it’s food court is packed to the brim 24×7. i am not talking sunday afternoon packed. i am talking december 24th packed.

the seven-eleven shopping experience is supplanted by the neighborhood pharmacy or the ‘kirana’ stores. they stock amazing amount of merchandise in a very small place. just gotta ask him. if he doesn’t have it, he’ll get it to you by end of the day, devlivered to your door. no receipt, no sales tax. only thing missing is beer.

the regular groceries can also be bought via the safeway experience in outlets like spar supermarket and about 10 other clones. they just cost a lot more and have a nice overall experience., including the aforementioned long checkout lines. we indulge in it a few times. regardless of where you buy the fruits in particular are spectacular. they are fresh, ready to eat and totally delicious. i’ve discovered the true taste of fruits after coming here – they’re now my preferred mid-night snack.

as far as eating out goes, you have the now-familiar range of ultra-expensive to ultra-cheap. the breakfast stuff is best at the ‘darshini’ or ‘sagar’ outlets. cheap, hot and pretty taste most of the time. i heard that women typically don’t go there. the city has all kinds of cuisine within a 20 min driving distance. you’d have to put up with some creative liberties with the authenticity of cuisines you expect. as they say here.. “swalpa adjust maadi”.

while looking for the furniture getting settled in, we pretty much went with the two kinds – the mythical shivaji nagar area (any auto fellow would know where it is) for the mid-range furniture. we got our guest bed set there. we shopped at lifestyle (at richmond soolay circle), @ home (near forum) and the home town (on outer ring road at marathahalli) for the living room furniture. pricey, i know. but if you want good looking furniture, you’d have to go to one of these places.

and speaking of door-step service, the “ironbox” man is awesome. he picks up the clothes, presses and delivers them back to you by evening.

all said and done, the best shopping experience is still with the vegetable vendor that comes calling punctually at 7am. he is polite, on time, reasonably priced, and you feel good supporting the hard-working man.

and finally some rules of thumb: don’t pay until someone asks you to pay and until you’ve received the goods in your hands. don’t give an advance for anything. for big ticket purchases, don’t be bashful to ask for discounts and deals. most good deals happen ‘off the books’, so don’t be anal about it. it’s part of the economy/culture. returns pretty much aren’t a norm. so feel free to open the boxes to inspect the goods before a purchase. for electrical items, the shop keeper even plugs in and demonstrates to you that it works before you buy. for many services, there isn’t a need to tip – but tip them.

the best way to get there is by the shuttle bus operated by the bmtc. the [...]]]> how hard should it be to get to an airport? well, from koramangala, the new bengaluru international airport takes a mere two hours to get to. and that too at 7 am in the morning! god help those leaving at 4pm.

the best way to get there is by the shuttle bus operated by the bmtc. the info on the routes is sketchy at best. the best available info is tucked away in two pages – bmtc and bial. the phone numbers for info listed on the airport site never answer the calls.

while figuring out how to get my dad to the airport, i was left wondering how the hell would i find out exactly where the bus stops in koramangala. all i knew from the above links was that it would pass via the forum mall. so me and dad camped out in front of the forum mall (dairy circle side) until we saw the bus pass by – you can tell with the well-lit inside of the bus and many dangling yellow holds for standing passengers. we then chased the bus to it’s destination/starting point in koramangala.

while shopping for a bike in india, all said and done, it comes down to whether you [...]]]> after the 4-wheel bakeoff ended with a maruti swict zxi, it was time for the 2-wheel hunt. and after a 2-month introspection about what i want in my 2-wheeled sidekick, i got my royal enfield machismo 350 home last weekend.

while shopping for a bike in india, all said and done, it comes down to whether you want that is zippy and sporty or, a classic hog. in the sporty/zippy segment, the bajaj pulsar is the staple. then comes the hero honda kariza: a bit pricey but definitely has the looks and the performance. tvs has come out with the apache model that looks quite bad-ass and has excellent performance as well.

but i thought the sporty bikes weren’t what i want. having sold my jeep wrangler in the u.s. before i moved out to bangalore, and i had to to backfill my need to own a specimen of classic mechanical perfection. something that lets you see what it’s got, and yet have plenty of mystery underneath.

so i went with the only two motorcycles that had the looks and the performance worthy of being called a chopper. the bajaj avenger and the royal enfield bullet.

the bajaj avenger felt wanting on the raw power side. popping a sport-bike (pulsar) engine topping out at 220 cc into a cruiser bike neither gave it the performance nor the sound nor the comfort while cutting through the roads around the kasturba road. the sitting position is too low, the foot pegs too forward for practicality of the bumpy indian roads. one friend (nicknamed ‘bogo’) said it right – a cruiser is awesome on the open roads of american back country where there arent’ too many bumps. but when you git the nasty patch on the indian road, you feel it on your ass on the cruiser – it ain’t pleasant. opening the throttle yields only a quiet whimper and a purr. disappointing.

i was quiet happy with my test ride on the bullet, so i ordered the green machismo variant weighing in at 350 cc. after a 3 week wait and repeated phone calls to the dealer (jayanagar) for the status of my order, i got mine last week.

the ride home was, frankly, nervous. she felt heavy and awkward to handle. the kick-start on the right kept getting in the way of my right leg when i stop, so i kept using my left leg. the engine halted once or twice but that’s rider-error. after a day or two, i took her out for my ride to work from koramangala to domlur.

breaking into the gear shift was a bit rough. hanging a right through the sony world junction, i was awkwardly groping for various gear positions, and the complaining growls it made were quite embarrassing. but once you know the spots, she shifts smooth as butter. she definitely does let you know when she’s happy and she ain’t. once you let her loose, she makes that familiar thumping noise, and you know you and her are in perfect harmony. shifting into gears as i rip through the intermediate ring road, you feel the raw power in your hands and the heat from the engine on your legs. the seating position is perfect and the overstated engine rhythm runs up the spine. the ride is firm, smooth and sure-footed, but in case you forget, the big tank in front is a reminder of what you are riding. i let ‘er rev in the 4th gear, but you can’t go faster on that road. leaves you wondering how it’d be when she’s ripping at 120.

it was cloudy and overcast on my way home, and the chill of the pre-rain wind shows exactly what ‘sticking your nose in the wind’ really means. and then it started to rain. i had taken the visor off the helmet for the ride, don’t really mind getting wet. as she’s rumbles through the rain, you can’t help but wonder why men dig something big and powerful between their legs.

from time-spent point of view, i do spend a lot more time working in india than when i was in the US. my [...]]]> it’s a familiar question. ‘how is it working in india?’ is probably the question i get asked most. and admittedly, what i used to ask myself before i moved. and here is the low-down.

from time-spent point of view, i do spend a lot more time working in india than when i was in the US. my job is a great reference point for this comparison, because i have the exact same job in bangalore as i had in the bay area before i moved. i wondered why i work longer, and it boils down to the urge on my part to stay ‘in the mix’ with the day-to-day happenings in our US office.

in the bay area, i typically used to work from 9 am to 7 pm (so that i can leave after the HOV lane opens up on the 237 from sunnyvale to milpitas). once the kids went to bed, may be i’d get on a call probably three times a week at night before going to bed. here in bangalore, i still do the same office hours, but i spend almost 2 hours every night on phone calls on pretty much every weekday. working on a product (rather than a service/consulting), the job requires a lot more person-person interaction in a many-to-many directions, multiplying the time i spend on the phone.

the folks in consulting can throw bodies at on-site coordination and have the delivery model nailed to avoid this kind of night-time overtime, but in a product company the whole asynchronous communication modalities haven’t been totally worked out.

and then, there is culture around the office – one thing is starkly different: people are a lot more a-political and a lot more collaborative. clearly absent is an undercurrent of zero-sum – i.e., for person A getting ahead doesn’t need him/her to be better than person B. it leads to complacency but it works. in a different way that i am yet to fathom.

in regular conversations, some people feel a weird compulsion to use american idioms to reinforce their the well-traveled credentials, but somehow, those idoms got mutated in many cases. it always sounds odd when people say ‘take a call’ rather than ‘make a call’ (to mean ‘make a decision’). it’s always flying ‘down’ to a town, even if they are going north. everything is always sent ‘across’ to someone. words like ‘jeez’ and ‘gosh’ are used, even if a person isn’t a christian, and have no particular issues with taking the god’s name in vain. profanity is a big no-no, even if used to make a strong point. i am trying my best to get my language cleaned up a bit.

and people sit in the cafeteria to sip coffee together and share a plate of chips, with no visible urgency to ‘get back to work’. in the US, this would generally be considered ‘goofing off’. i am not complaining, though. people watch the cricket matches down in the break room (called ‘breakout room’) with apparent impunity and lack of guilt. but i do know that the same guys are busting their chops till midnight to meet a deadline.

working over the weekends is quite normal, and some cases, manager could make a not-so-subtle request for an employee to work over weekends. that sort of request (made with an obligatory apologetic-yet-no-choice tone) would either be considered ‘evil bossy’ or grounds for overtime in the u.s. remember bill lumbergh the movie ‘office space‘?

even more unnatural is the propensity of people to talk openly about each other’s compensation. i thought it’s in the best interest of everybody if each of us didn’t discuss our comp with our colleagues. but somehow, the comp system has reached equilibrium here where employees know each others’ pay. managers beware. in the manager-employee relationship, neither the carrot nor the stick work particularly well. nor do lofty goals, inspirational speeches, mission statements, job satisfaction and the prospect of a major pay increase. (well in a majority of cases). more often than not, a straight-up supervisor-worker relationship tossed in with job security does just fine. overt public praise works like magic.

back to the question of ‘how is it working in india?’. most important thing is that one should get rid of the presumption that it not-so-good, and the answer to the question would somehow need only to describe how bad it is. it’s definitely is different, but it’s as satisfying as anywhere (at least at my company). you just have to get used to the differences.

here in bangalore, i get a lot done in a short period of time. i do interesting work, and i get a sense of accomplishment.