Well, to start things this was not my first visit to Bangalore. I have visited the city thrice before. But all these three times the sense of purpose was that of a tourist. It looks rather funny now, the first time when I traveled there. My dad and mom took me to Bangalore airport (My memory not failing me, I think I was 6 years then) I was awe struck at the site of planes taking of into the sky. Being a stubborn child that I was back then, I made a big fuss at the airport to let me go in one of those planes. I just wanted to fly of into the sky. I cried and shouted so much, that the airport security guard had an enquiry with my dad, just to make sure nobody was being kidnapped. In the end my parents managed to take me out of the airport.
Now after six years since my last visit, I entered the city again in a volvo bus. As I woke up in the early hours, trying to take a peek out of the window, I could see patches of gaping holes being dug out in the highway, uncompleted beams of bridges, flyovers half built. Then I saw the first of many company buildings that have spawned in and around Bangalore. GelTech, Wipro, Alcatel-Lucent, Tech Mahindra, Oracle all came one by one along the highway. I was sure that the company I am going to work for was located somewhere along this IT corridor. Finally I got down at Lal Park. You won’t face any language problem in Bangalore if you are a tamil. Most of the people can understand what you are trying to speak. To my pleasant surprise, the auto rickshaw’s actually charge meter fares there (and actually all people wear helmets while traveling in bike, something you never see in TN). You have policemen wearing Cow boy like hats which seemed cool. I moved to the city center i.e., Majestic rather pretty quickly from Lal Park. After the morning refreshments, I came out of the hotel lobby at 9 am. I could see the city buzzing with traffic (I was later going to have a first hand experience of traffic nightmare, that I have heard only in news reports in TV channels). I moved from there to Thergupet in auto. Once I reached there, I could see this side of the city was no better than Rice outlets in Coimbatore (Ukkadam area) characterized by muddy roads, small shabby shops, men loading and unloading rice shacks from Lorries. Well, the city was not all the glitz and glamour I was imagining it to be. After a brief stint there, I decided to check out the office I am going to be working in.
I took an auto; the electronic city was bit far from where I was now. I could have taken a bus, but the boards were all in kanada. To make matters worse there was no listing of all the places where the bus was going to travel (as you find in TN City buses) only the end destination where bus was going was displayed. So it was an auto, which I chose to travel. The traffic had increased a lot by now, to add to the nightmare there seemed to be a traffic signal every 500 m, with 150 sec timer count. With so many vehicles, getting bogged down in this signals we seemed to be moving at snail’s pace. Really unless you have a house near your office getting on time to your workplace could be a major headache. We now moved to outer city where there was comparatively less traffic. I could see girls with their typical urban sleeveless t-shirts (couldn’t blame them for wearing that, it was so hot by now) and jeans. I couldn’t help noticing almost all the girls I ended up looking seem to have earphones plugged in listening to the music in their ipods or mobile phones. I started wondering whether the girls here, were born with ear phones. Some of the t-shirts were so short and tight, may be the girl by mistake wore the t-shirt of her younger sister in the morning rush I thought to myself with an mischievous smile. Finally we reached the IT corridor road, as we moved through one could see the concrete glass jungles, the perfect word to describe Offices there. HoneyWell, Accenture, HSBC, Infosys, AirTel, Convergys to mention a few companies there. Actually this reminded me of the chat shops selling bhel poori in Coimbatore, we used to have them for every road. Only difference here was bhel poori shops was replaced by MNC’s.
Finally I reached my office, it was no different from other concrete glass jungles. Only here we had three MNC’s IBM, Cisco and my company sharing towers of the same arcade. It was really cool looking at my future office. One of the techies came out of the arcade after a security check, only to find a suitable place for puffing his cigar. I needed a place to stay somewhere in this area. Right next to the arcade, were two fifty floor twin towers, rather you could call them apartments developed by DLF, almost in finished state. It could be sometime before I could afford one of those DLF homes I thought. It was time to have my lunch; I decided to move back to Majestic, this time I decided to take a bus, after enquiring the routes. As I moved towards the city center, it started raining and the old nightmare of traffic was back to irritate me. It took nearly one and half hour to reach the city center again. I reached the hotel, took a seat and ordered the typical dosa’s. The Deccan Herald newspaper which was near were I sat caught my eye. The vociferous reader that I am, I started going through it from last page sports section and moved onto business section. There was a report on outsourcing in the lower half of the page saying a reputed MNC IT firm (I don’t want to mention the name) had cut down on its employees in Australia and shifted the operations done by those in Australia to Bangalore and Hyderabad Offices in India. It made me think economic trade between countries is no different from physics , like two jugs of water interconnected by tube , where the water flows from higher volume to lower volume until both of them reach equilibrium.
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