One day in New Delhi

Our Air India flight from Bangalore to New Delhi was very good. Not too late leaving, great in-flight service, and quick and efficient arrival procedure.

The welcome awaiting passengers upon exiting the airport takes a little getting used to. There are hundreds and hundreds of people holding name cards up, ready to whisk arriving passengers through the New Delhi night to their hotel.

We found our man, or rather identified ourselves as matching the names on his sign, and he needled his way through the crowd to take our bags. Then it was up to us to keep up with him, as he filed through the crowd, left the airport, and wound his way through the maze of cars to one for which he apprently held the keys.

The view from the Park hotel

Street scenes taken on the move through Delhi

There are so many sensory experiences in India, and pictures can only begin to share some of what it is like. Here are a few of my favourite shots.

According to the locals, the air pollution has improved greatly since the introduction of natural gas buses. On the buses is hand-painted the tagline, "Powered by clean fuel", attesting to just that. Below is a bus, crammed with public transportation patrons, and jammed in between the bus lane and ours are wedged an auto rickshaw and a motorcycle.

The check-in queues at the New Delhi International Airport were impressive, but we actually were processed pretty quickly. Departure time was 1:55am, which is planned so late in order that the Zurich airport will be open by the time we land. I skipped dinner and breakfast in favour of my attempt at sleeping, which worked pretty effectively.

Back in Zurich, I checked into the Arrival Lounge to freshen up, and headed out to the bus terminals to take me the 8 minutes to the office. Time to put in that full day's work.

Bye bye, Bangalore

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.

I have 24 hours in Delhi before the red eye home that departs at the lovely hour of 2am, depositing me back in Zurich in time to put in a full day at the office. Perfect.