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Getting a Phone in Bangalore

Back to Bangalore. (Thanks god I have all of those notes.)

One of the adventures in Bangalore was getting a phone. I planned on getting a SIM card for my phone as soon as I get to Bangalore, since I was sure life would be much easier, and getting a SIM card is somewhat of a fixed cost, so it's good to get it over with early. On my first day, Friday, I went around Brigade Road looking for a place to get it. I asked people in a few random stores and finally someone pointed me to a kiosk. I got there, told them I wanted a SIM card, they said it was R$250 (~US$6.25) which seemed like a pretty good deal, at least much less than what I paid in Brazil. Little did I expect what it would cost me in terms of time.

I hand over the money, get the card. One little detail, the guy says, he needs a copy of my passport and a passport photo. A photo? What the hell? I say where am I supposed to get it. He says: don't worry, just bring it some time. Great, I think, sounds like this means "bring it sometime if you have nothing better to do, otherwise forget about it". Ok. What about activation? In 12 hours it will be working, he says, then you can charge the credit. And it doesn't matter when I bring the photo, I ask? No, whenever. Awesome I think. I go send out an email with my new number to family, saying they can call me in 12 hours.

The next day came and the phone wasn't working, but I was too busy to go figure out why. Finally I got to the guy in the evening, said "What's the deal?" Well, he says, where is the photo and the copy of the passport. You bring them, then, 12 hours later, it will be working. Damn, now I see it in painful clarity. Ok, so I go looking for a place to take photos. No such luck, everything is closed.

Next day I repeat the same in the morning. It's Sunday though, so everything is closed until after noon. Finally at 1:30 p.m. I find a place to make photos and copies. Both are cheap (Rs. 60 for the photo, Rs.1 per page for copies), but did it take time. Finally I got to the guy, he registers me somwhere. Then ask me for a proof of residence. What? Luckily I had my hotel receipt on me and that worked.

So, at 2 p.m. my phone is registered (though not yet working) and I rejoyce in anticipation of cheap phone calls. The cell phone rates really make up for the hassle of the registration. Sure things are generally cheap in India compared to other countries, but one might think cell phone calls are cell phone calls. At least between Russia, US and Brazil there is little difference in price. In India, however, I learn that my pre-paid plans is going to be half a rupee per minute for calls within Bangalore (including cellphones). Half a rupee is just a bit more than US$0.01 - something like US$0.015 with taxes. How, this is base rate, without any "deals". There are ads all over advertizing one rupee rates for any place in Karnataka (the state) or Rs 0.25 for local calls. In Rio the base rate for pre-paid was R$1.30, i.e. US$0.70, so that's a 50 time difference. They warn me that when I get to Calcutta I will have to pay roaming - the crazy rate of Rs.6 per minute (US$0.15). Again, that's roaming. Another strange twist: calls to landline phones are more expensive than calls to other cell phones. I suppose it makes sense. The landline phone system is probably antiquated and monopolized. Cell phone market seems to be competitive and the equipment is new.

I go celebrate with a lunch at "Nagarjuna" at Residency Road. The lunch in Nagarjuna was the first fully satisfying meal I had in India, and I finally understood what people mean when they say that food is awesome in India. They mean Nagarjuna on Residency Road. For R$100 (US$2.50, cheap by the area standards, since it's not hard to end up paying over US$10 for a meal there), I got a fix-price South Indian meal, where they give you a banana leaf and waiters pass by and spoon rice, dahl and other things on it. Just for dahl and rice it would have been worth it.

The fun pla thing about Nagarjuna was that it felt intensely "local" place. Not that there are foreigners in Bangalore in general (I probably saw a dozen over my week there), but the places that I went to before seemed to be dominated by young yuppies like myself who among whom I probably only stood by being blond. Nagarjuna, on the other hand, seemed like a family place and I didn't see any other foreigners. Since I was alone, I they also put me to share a table with a gentlemen that looked ~50, so I could see how he was eating his food and he could see how I was eating mine. Did I mention they didn't give me a fork? And of course I didn't want to stoop to asking for one and instead did my beast eating with my hand with the extra pressure of being watched by a local. (I did eat my dinner with a hand last night too, but that was sitting by myself in a dark corner - no pressure.)

Next morning I find my phone working, a few hours later I get a call from my wife. (The cheap cell phone rates don't apply to international calls, so I can't call her and have to wait for her to call.) I also recharge the phone, which turns out to be strangely easy. In Brazil and Russia you buy a card to recharge your phone. In Bangalore, you find a guy who recharges phones, give him your phone number, pay, he makes a call, you get an SMS and your phone is recharged.

Next day the phone stop working. I find the guy, he says he doesn't know why. I go to the "Hutch" store on Brigade Road ("Hutch" is the cell provider brand). I should have gone there on day one, except that I didn't find it. They tell the guy sold me a card that was supposed to go with a particular Nokia handset, so it got desactivated. You'll have to get a new one they say. Luckily it's only R$100 (not the R$250 that I paid to the other guy) and they do everything on the spot. (And luckily I the extra photos, a copy of my passport and my hotel receipt with me.)

From that point on, though, the phone worked with no surprizes, and I was quite happy with the quality of signal everywhere.

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The Other Bangalores

I said "to be continued" on the last Bangalore post, but the discussion of Bangalore software industry would have to wait. Writing it takes the sort of concentration that I am trying to reserve for my dissertation those days. So, back to pictures and stories that I can more or less directly copy-and-paste from my journal.

In the afternoon of the Saturday that started at Koshy's I got my first glimps of the other Bangalore, when I went to attend a Bangalore Perl-Mongers' event. After a short auto ride from MG Road, I am now in an office with the most immaculate desks and the most nice looking chairs that I have ever seen. I am sitting around a conference table with some programmers, a guy is talking about Perl 6. And you can just barely barely hear the honking. (They must have invested some good money in sound isolation, I think to myself.) Now, if it weren't for that distant honking I would start seriously doubting if I am still in the same city. It feels a bit like two different worlds. But in between them there is a bit of a transition area. You can stand there at the entrance to the building and turn your head one way (autorikshas, people driving like total nutcases, noise), then another (a nice shiny lobby, uniformed security people, still the damn noise).

Speaking of driving, some of you might be wondering: what's the big deal with driving, don't people drive like crazy in Rio/Shangai/Santa Cruz? No, I seriously miss the orderly traffic of those cities. Ok, Santa Cruz was kind of crazy, but at least there are not as many cars.

A few hours later I am back in the Noise Hell on Brigade Road. It's a Saturday night and the street is just one continuous HOOOOOOOONK. It's the first time in my life that I have to weight options like (a) walk back half a block and endure the honking to buy a bottle of water vs. (b) just stay thirsty until morning. (I did decide to walk back half a block, but only some serious consideration.) My next dilemma was whether getting dinner was worth another round of pain and if so then which place would minimize the total amount of noise I would need to endure. People just honk and honk and honk. I am afraid that I will start having honking nightmares.

I return to Brigade Road the next morning and find its empty and quiet. This is not so surprising per se (it's Sunday morning), but my memories of Saturday night honking are still fresh and I find it hard to find the same place so empty. I walk around and take some pictures. I spend the rest of the day visiting some more parts of Bangalore, including the Majestic, which according to the Lonely Planet is Bangalore's "grittier" downtown. I liked the Majestic quite a bit, and it ended up being less of a culture shock than Brigade Road, probably because I expected it to be.

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The next morning I went to visit an office of a large US company, which was situated in a nice residential area. The visit involved a lot of fascinating conversations, but no visual shocks. That was reserved for the afternoon, I later learned, when I went to visit the Electronic City. It was a long (about an hour and a half) but interesting trip. The auto I was in passed through some poorer parts of Bangalore in the souther end of the city, then got onto a future highway. The highway was very much under construction, and traffic on it was a disaster, but with a bit of squinting you can see the place being transformed into the city of the future. After a wrong turn and then some driving on the highway against the traffic (there is the first time for everything), I saw the outlines of Electronic City in the distance. It was unlike anything I had seen in Bangalore before. It was also separated from the rest of Bangalore by a fence.

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I had an interesting conversation with a professor at IIITb, who then introduced me to some of his students, including a Brazilian, Ricardo, who came to Bangalore from Vitoria to do an M.S. at IIITb. Ricardo has a blog.

As I learned next morning, however, I did not have to travel all the way to Electronic City to see that Bangalore. My Tuesday morning meeting was at Embassy Golf Links, a "technopark" not that far from Brigade Road, which looks more Silicon Valley than the Silicon Valley itself, both inside and outside. The only thing that gave it away was that the concentration of US household names on office buildings was just too high. And the fact that the lights went off while I was vising the office, though I think we had that in CA quite a few times in 2000.

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Bangalore Software Developers

After my visit to the Bangalore City Market I headed back to Church Street to meet my first Bangalore contact - the first of 16-20 people with whom I had a chance to converse in the next week. This time it was a friend of a friend from California, and we had arranged to meet by email while I was in NY. Let's call him "Anand." We met at Koshy's - a restaurant that many seem to be consider an institution, known for it's "quaint charm" more than for its stellar food (to quote the link earlier in this sentence). Of course, for a tourist, part of the charm of those kind of places is trying to figure out what exactly makes them so charming to the locals and experimenting in taking that charm on faith.

Koshy's actually had several restaurants that occupy the whole block, so I just kept my fingers crossed and walked into the middle one. I glanced around the room and someone waved at me. It turned out to be "Anand," so the hardest part was over. "Yeah," he said, "it wasn't hard to recognize you." (I sent him a link to a photo the day before.) We sat down, exchanged a few words, then started ordering, since the waiter was standing next to us, impatient. Anand ordered a "masala omelette" (not on the menu) and a toast, I did the same. We start talking. First about the bars and pubs in Bangalore - I got some recommendations for eating. Anand then asked me where I was from. I said I was from Russia originally and mentioned that in Brazil this gets me more love than saying that I live in the US. "Ten years ago it would have been the same in India," said Anand, "People were in love with Russia." When he was in high school, he continued, their history book dedicated half a year to the Russian Revolution. "I used to be a communist," he added.

We then talk about what Anand does and how he go there. He is in his mid 20s, and grew up in Madras/Chennai, the capital of the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu. He says he wanted to do physics at one of Madras' elite colleges, but didn't manage to get in and decided to study computers elsewhere. He is now working for a "product company" in Bangalore.

As I learned over the next few days, in Bangalore "a product company" typically refers to a large US company that employs Bangalore software developers to work on its own products or internal systems. Those companies are invariable household names in US, and Anand's company is no exception. "A product company" is one of several types of IT employers that my interviewees often identified, and it's generally seen as being near the top of the food chain. The complete hierarchy looks rough as follows.

Research

At the very top of the chain is a handful of "research labs." Needless to say those jobs are very few. The employers are mostly large US companies, though Infosys has a research lab too.

Core Product

"Product companies" comprise the second tier of employers - or the top tier if you ignore the tiny research tier above it. Those are household names that hire developers to work on their own stuff. This tier is sizable, employing thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands of software developers. To get a job here one would need a 4 year engineering degree. No experience past that is required however - in fact, I heard many times that "product" companies prefer to higher people straight out of college, finding it easier to mould fresh minds into their corporate culture then to re-educate engineers with work experience in India. Such companies are always foreign, typically based on the west coast of the US, and as I understand, top management in all such companies is mostly comprised of Indians who have worked in the US and have come back. There is a common opinion that one cannot find managers with appropriate experience in India, and that there is generally shortage of management talent. At the same time, for technical jobs, local developers seem to be preferred to returnees.

Services

"Service companies" hire developers to build software systems for their clients. This tier includes both foreign and Indian companies, but the biggest players are Indian. Wipro, TCS ("Tata Consultancy Services") and Infosys are probably the largest (those deserve an extra word - see below), though US-based consulting companies seem to be catching up. Working for a service company usually requires a 3 year undergraduate degree (not necessarily a 4 year engineering degree), plus a training course.

BPO

The the lowest tier in IT employment are "BPO" ("business process outsourcing") jobs. Those mostly involve data entry and call centers. They typically require knowledge of how to use a computer. People usually do a non-degree training course for that. People I talked to in Bangalore were from the first three tiers, so I have limited knowledge of the BPO sector.

Support

Somewhere between services and BPO, there is an another sector: tech support. As I understand, those jobs vary in technical sophistication: some are more like call center jobs, others require more knowledge.

And then there are the exceptions: small Indian start-ups, free software companies, non profits. Those would be hardly noticeable in the employment statistics, though I find that it is often worthwhile looking for people who do "strange" things like that. With some luck, I'll get back to those eventually.

Meanwhile a few words about the Wipros and the Tatas. Wipro started as a vegetable oil company ("Western India Vegetable Products Limited"), and has produced all sorts of stuff over its 60 year history. It still makes soap, light bulbs, baby oil and furniture. TCS is a part of Tata Group, which is India's largest private sector company and seems to make every imaginable product: fertilizers, tea, cars, wallets, etc. Trucks are the most noticeable of Tata's products, since you can see them on all Indian roads. While IT services and BPO have become an important source of revenues for both companies, it's just one of the many many many things that they do. This kind of diversity may seem odd in US context, where the stress is so often on finding one's core strengths and selling, outsorcing or downsizing the rest. There is a reason for it, however, which is the Indian "License Raj". Until the economic reforms started 1990s, India had a semi-planned economy. While much of the manufacturing was done by the private sector, any manufacturing required a license. Getting licenses required a combination of political connections and luck. As a result, the companies often found themselves unable to expand production of things that they already knew how to do, but on the other hand found themselves in possession of licenses to manufacture an entirely new product. What does a vegetable oil company do if it suddenly obtains a license to make scooters while unable to get a license to expand its vegetable oil production? It starts making scooters. After 40 years of the License Raj, most successfull Indian companies found themselves making absolutely everything: from soap to IT services. That's the case of Wipro and Tata. It's not the case of Infosys, though, which started as an IT services company in early 1980s and has pretty much stuck with IT.

(to be continued)

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Bangalore City Market

During my first night in Bangalore I managed to sleep until 5 a.m., which I declared a victory over jetlag. I then read for an hour (a book I bought the day before, "India Unbound" by Gurcharan Das), then ventured out. I decided to go to the city market, which I figured should start early on a Saturday morning. I took an autoriksha there, which deserves a few words.

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Autorikshas, locally referred to as just "auto" dominate the streets of Bangalore. They look like motorcycles transformed into a mini-car: in front there is a seat for a driver, who has a motocycles-style handle bar rather than a steering wheel. Behind the driver there is a seat for two people, though I've seen as much as 5 or 6 people riding in them. There is a meter between the driver and the passenger, and that's how the fare is supposed to be negotiated. Metered fare is very cheap by US standards - you can cross all of Bangalore for 100 rupees ($2.50). In practice, at least with foreigners like myself, the driver often asks for a fixed price, often much much above what the metered fare would be. It is sometimes possible to either negotiate the price down closer to what the metered fare would be or to insist on metered fare, but it's hard, especially for short rides. That is, the drivers might be willing to go across the city with the meter, but would not do a short ride without being promised at least 30-50 rupees (instead of maybe just 12 if metered).

Riding in an autorikshas is a bit like a Disneyland ride. Lanes, for example, are largely ignored, and autorikshas lane-split (go between two occupied lanes) as if they actually were motocycles. But hey, buses lane-split in Bangalore. You have to see it to believe it. Two things prevent massive death: the drivers quite obvious exceptional skill in handling their autos, and the fact that the traffic is so slow. That saturday morning I saw a man bumped by a bus. Luckily for him, the bus was going just about 5 miles an hour, as was the rest of the traffic.

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The city market was colorful and busy, though really overwhealming in its dirtyness. On the plus side, people were really friendly, in a sincere way. As I wondered around the market, I found many people asking me where I was from and what my name was ("What's your good name?"). The conversation never went much past that, since nobody really spoke much English. (Even the autoriksha drivers speak rather limited English, nor do they necessarily speak Kannada.) But it was nice to see people asking questions seeming simply out of curiocity, not to sell me anything. The questions about my good name and offers to put dye on my forehead were never followed up with a request to buy.

Perhaps most surprisingly, a few people asked me to take photos of them. (I was wondering around with a large SLR, which I was trying to keep discrete, but took out occasionally to take the photos.) At first, I found this strange and replied with some sort of generic "no thanks", but one boy was more persistent than others, and when I realized that he really wanted me to take a picture of him, I did. I asked him for his address offering to send him a print, but he didn't seem to understand my question.

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The same morning, after visiting the market and getting a cup of chai and a slice of coconut filled naan for Rs.6, I stopped by to have a look at the nearby palace of Tipu Sultan - the last sultan of Mysore. (Mysore was a state in pre-British India that largely overlapped with modern Karnataka. It's capital was in the city of Mysore, 120 km from Bangalore, and later in Srirangapatna, but the sultan had a palace in Bangalore too. The British later moved the capital to Bangalore, which was much more to their liking climate-wise.) The palace wasn't anything to write home about, but offered a nice view of the nearby temple.

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First Impressions of Bangalore

(See Arriving in Bangalore for the beginning.)

After checking into my hotel, I left my stuff there and headed out for a walking tour of Bangalore. I discovered quickly that it's perhaps not the best city for a nice relaxing walk. The main problem is noise. Cars and autorikshas all honk non-stop. It's really just one continuous honk. I also found the city really polluted - worse than Beijing, and that's a really tough target to beat.

My first task after leaving the hotel was finding money. I managed to find an ATM soon. Imagine the joy of typing in the number "12000" when asked how much you want. It really makes you feel rich! (Many things in India do, as I soon learned.) I then started looking for Church Street / Brigade Road / MG Road area, which was supposed to be Bangalore's "yuppie" area. I figured I'll start there, then slowly make my way to the grittier parts. It took me some walking to find it, and not all of that walking was worth it. I found Church Street somewhat more palatable than the areas around it in terms of noise and pollution. It was now down to Beijing's levels of pollution (again, that's still pretty bad, but breathable). It seemed at the time that I was also down to Beijing levels of traffic and noise, though that changed in a short time, as the rush hour started to kick in and people started showing up for night life.

In terms of yuppiness, Church Street / Brigade Road was a bit of a surprise. I saw a treet that is barely paved, and buildings that reminded me more of Kharbin, maybe some parts of Recife, but definitely not of Shangai or Beijing, as I expected. I realized Bangalore was in India, but I some how expected it to be different from the rest of the country. (I later learned that it is different, just not as much as I expected.) After being so impressed with how connected Banglore seemed with the Silicon Valley, I expected it to look at least a little bit like it. What I was seeing, looked like a provincial 3rd world town. And when I say 3rd world I do not mean Brazil. In the past I could have used the term "3rd world" to refer to Brazil, but there in Bangalore, walking along Church Street, I decided that I'll never use that term to refer to Brazil again. Not to say that I count Bangalore's 3rd world looks against it (though, for the 3rd world look I enjoyed other parts of Bangalore more.)

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(Those photos of downtown were taken a few days later on a Sunday afternoon when the area was quiet and empty.)

Now, I had seen office photos of Bangalore's office buildings, so I knew that someone around here there must be some islands of Silicon Valleyness. But despite that, I found it hard to believe such buildings could be anything within 100 km range. I kept catching myself seriously doubting that I am in Bangalore, I mean the Bangalore. The bangalore that Brazilian IT economists are obsessed with? No way! (Next morning, I was asking the receptionist at the hotel today what sort of things one could do in Bangalore before 8 a.m. -- and found myself pausing before saying the world "Bangalore". I had to mentally prepare myself for the possibility that he will laugh in my face and say "But you are not in Bangalore!")

Now, let me make one thing clear: those were my first impressions of Bangalore, and they did change later, so stay tuned. And Bangalore is definitely building. The construction might not happen by means I would have expected, but there are a few large buildings being consructed walking distance from Church Street (though it took me a few days to find them), and someone vising the place in a few years might end up with a different experience.

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Arriving in Bangalore

It's been over two months since I came back from India, and here comes the first blog entry about the trip. There were a few reasons for the delay. First, I brought back a rather overwhealming quantity of photos and decided that to process all of them required engaging some economies of scale, pushing all 9 GB of photos through each step in my phoot-processing pipeline together. That took a month. Then I had some computer problems with upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10, aka Disaster of the Year. But it was also the difficulty of writing about India. India was just so so confusing, like no other place that I have been to before. I was originally hoping that if I just wait a week after my return, it would all settle and start making sense, but that didn't happen. So, instead of presenting some sort of re-thought analysis of the trip, I am just going back to the notes that I wrote while in India or soon after, just editing them for style.

The first strong impressions in connection to my trip to India preceeded the actual arrival there. About two or three weeks before the trip, once I got back to US from Brazil in the first days of August, I started planning my time in Bangalore. I wanted to spend a little over a week in Bangalore talking to software developers there. (The idea was to get some perspective on what I've been looking at in Brazil and also start thinking about potential future projects.) Since I was going to spend only nine days there, I had no time to waste. So, rather than showing up in Bangalore and trying to line up people there (as I did for my first round of fieldwork in Brazil), I tried my best to line up Bangalore contacts while still in US, and in fact go as far as to schedule individual meetings. I spammed a bunch of friends asking if they knew someone in Bangalore. I also emailed a bunch of people whose blogs, etc. I found on the web. During the first week I was not getting much in terms of positive responses, but then they suddenly started to arrive. By the time I was about to leave for India, I had a list of more people that I could realistically meet.

That tought me something about India: the extent to which my social network is linked to those of Bangalore. This was such a contrast to what had happened in Brazil during my first round: there I spent I first few weeks wrecking my head as to where to find software developers and it took me about two months to meet the first 20 people. In Bangalore I talked to 20 people just in the first week. (Of course, none of this is to downplay the help of all the people who either referred me to their friends or friends of friends or agreed to meet.)

On Aug 22 I flew out of Newark, heading for Delhi. I was flying with Alitalia and had a stop in Milan, where I got a cup of Italian capuccino, which was quite good, and one of those rolls with creme inside, which amusingly they called "pasta." I just happened to have some euros on me (actually, I just happened to have a small roll with Euros, rubles, yuans and canadian dollars...), so I could even pay in euros and not make an idiot out of myself trying to pay in dollars. Though, my italian conversation didn't go very far (and people there and also on the plane seemed very serious about speaking Italian and most of the waiters didn't seem to speak much English), so they called me "mister" at the end ("Here it is, Mister"), which made me wonder if this was meant as synonim for "gringo". The rest of the flight wasn't too bad either. Having this break in between was nice, actually and I managed to sleep a bit on both legs of the flight. That was a big mistake, since I then couldn't fall asleep until 4 a.m. When I wasn't sleeping, I tried to make some use of the "Learn Kannada in a Month" book (by Srinivasa Sastry), which I soon had to put aside, realizing that I was holding quite possibly one of the worst language learning books ever written. (As I later learned, unfortunately, there appears to be no good Kannada books.)

I arrived to Delhi a little after 10 p.m. (When I was looking for my tickets, I discovered that it appears to find a NY-Delhi flight that is both short and arrives during the day.) My first impression of Delhi, right off of the plane: It felt a lot like Kazakhstan (if that means anything to you), but with one really weird quirk - the abundance of ancient-looking cars. They are called "Ambassador" and they look like they were designed in 1950s. Or, rather, they were designed in 1950s but are still made in India. So, imagine that ALL taxis are those Ambassadors. I've heard about India's ancient cars before, but I didn't expect to see quite as many of them and I didn't expect them to look quite as outdated.

Getting a taxi was a mess. There is no line, just some sort of brawnian motion that matches people to taxis. It took me a while to figure out how that game worked, but eventually I gathered enough courage to elbow the competition, much like everyone else was doing, and got into a taxi. I got a voucher for "pre-paid taxi" which is supposed to be a solution for taxi scams, so this did work well. There is just an office, you pay inside the airport, then take a taxi and give the taxi driver a voucher. The voucher says "tipping the driver is prohibited", I am guessing to make it clear that you don't owe it to them. (The guy did try to ask for a tip, but I didn't give it to him.)

I had made a reservation at "Tarra Hotel" for $15, which was near the airport. (I just called a hotel in Delhi from Skype and asked to make a reservation.) The hotel turned out to be the middle of what I would call a "favela," in Brazil. The hotel itself was also quite a dump. The room didn't have windows, there were ants on the floor, etc. Luckily, it did have air conditioning, which did work. On top of that, I couldn't fall asleep until 4 a.m., so I got to enjoy this dumpy room fully.

I slept until 6 or so, then got up and went for a walk around the "favela." That first taste of India was a bit overwhealming. There was no shortage of cows in the streets - I think you could pretty much see at least two cows regardless of which direction you look. Also lots of dogs, but not quite as many as cows. And kids. As I later learned, India in general is full of kids, like no other country that I've been to before. The cows and the dogs are invariably sick. The kids seemed ok. (Just to clarify: this was in the outskirts of Delhi, near the airport. As I learned later, central Delhi doesn't look like that.)

I returned back to my "hotel" and gook a taxi to the domestic airport. (The two airports are four kilometers apart and people talk about them as if they were different airports, though officially those are different terminals of the same airport.) I got there early, expecting to stand in a long line, but it turned out to be quite organized. There was had a self-checkin kiosk: you come up to it, type in your name and confirmation number form the e-ticket and they just print you a boarding pass. Nice. The plane and the service was very nice too. Alitalia wasn't bad, but the waiters all had this smirk on their faces. Here it was all super-attentive, everyone was nicely dressed, etc. They were supposed to serve a "snack", which turned out to be a good size lunch. (I was flying Jet Air. I bought the tickets through MakeMyTrip.com. I was happy with both.)

In Bangalore I again took a "pre-paid taxi" to my hotel, getting there without any adventures. I already had a hotel reserved here as well (In both casesI again had a hotel reserved ("Toms Hotel"), which was more expensive ($30) but also much better. The window faces a wall of another building one meter away and the shower just showers on the floor, but apart from there don't seem to be any problem. They even put a roll of toilet paper there for me.

I called one of my contacts whom I was supposed to meet the same day, learned that we would have to reschedule for Monday, then headed out to explore the Indian Silicon Valley.

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