Forty-eight hours in Bangalore - what a whirlwind. In during the middle of the night, out at peak rush hour... a dusty whirlwind, indeed. After departing Zurich in the pitch black and frigid morning on one of the earliest possible flights, and finding my connecting flight on the enormous departures board at CDG...
... and flying east all day, I arrived, a little rumpled, in India. It was well after midnight, local time, which I've learned is quite a popular time to frequent airports in the middle east. Time for a quick cat nap.
Day 1 started at 3:30am, according to my body clock, at least, and dragged on until the quick but courteous exit shortly before midnight from a protracted business dinner (party of 28 people).
A highlight was visiting this one particularly unassuming entrepreneur interested in selling his business. We all thought he was the doorman when he greeted us at his eponymously-labeled office building. His well-appointed and ridiculously oversized corner office sat opposite new but unoccupied desk space for 500 as yet unhired IT professionals which he promised would materialize beginning of next month for the signed contract he proudly showed us (the company's first). That meeting was quite a bit shorter than scheduled.
Day 2 was wall-to-wall meetings, business plan presentations, discussions of priorities, and innumerable tiny teacup fulls of sweet tea. What amazed me each time we emerged from the relative order of a western-style office complex out onto the dusty street was the somewhat magical moment when the driver, whose name no one could recall, in a car that couldn't be distinguished from any other, simply materialized from the surrounding melee without any delay, ready to whisk us on to our next appointment.
Attached is a 60 second clip driving through Bangalore. Count the number of honks or the number of auto rickshaws.
In India, honking is a courteous means of letting other nearby drivers know that you intend to pass or that you are trying to get by them. Many of the vehicles actually do have blinkers, but signaling with a flashing light cannot compete with the cacaphony of horns, so blinkers remain largely unused. I'm not sure why they bother with side mirrors either, as those mostly remain either folded in, or have already been sheared off completely.
Queueing up to drop us off at Bangalore International Airport (BLR). Unlike the last time through this airport, we actually cleared security before the scheduled departure time.
If there were any doubt about Bangalore being a progressive IT hub, just take a look at the little bookstore in the airport lobby. Its window is filled with famous books on leadership, technology and management, such as Classic Drucker, The Return of Learning, Managing at the Speed of Change, and Jim Collins' fantastic Good to Great.
In contracst to the bookstore, however is the slightly laggard departure screen 'system'. Every few minutes an update is made to the departure screen. Manually. Indeed a cursor appears on screen, and someone types over the previous data with the update. Clearly, the IT benefits of the Information Technology boom have not been felt everywhere in Bangalore.
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