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Bangalore – January 2010

Spending a couple of days working in Bangalore for meetings with colleagues in the Cisco Global Development Centre. First see below my hotel room for the three days I am in country. I arrived at 3am which saw me arrive at my hotel about 4.30-am – the Airport is a good 35 mins drive at this time of the morning whilst there is no traffic! However, that journey was not without interest. My taxi was involved in a RTA when another car cut right across in front of us! Fortunately, my driver my river was not travelling to fast at the time was able pull up in time – there was an impact but fortunately only a minor one…. This led to my first encounter with the local approach to dealing with a crisis of any sort! Much shouting and general emotional out pouring!!! However, after exchanging car registration numbers both vehicles were able to proceed on their way!


Above is my hotel room which is very comfortable – I was able to grab about 2.5 hours sleep before awaking and heading of to the office.


The journey to the office takes the best part of an hour and you can see from the photo above what the traffic here is like!!! Pretty much nose to tail from start to finish and no respect for traffic lanes. Basically, one will move from one lane to another in order to make the best possible progress – makes you feel like a weaver bird!!! You can imagine the apparent ciaos which this results in!!! An of course there seems to be a general view you can gain some priority you by “peeping” you horn. As I sit in my hotel room making this post I can hear the general backgound noise of the city which consists of a chorus of car and bus horn sounds! I would not be surprised that if you car horn is broken for some reason that this will prevent your car from moving at all!!!!


There are many “road side traders” the photo above shows cobbler with his modest shop and as you can see his working on the pavement. I am guessing that he is selling shoes as well as repairing them. This city is densely populated without any doubt and it is certainly not clean with lots of dust in every corner. I expect that it does get a clean with the rain comes and apparently they do get quite a bit of that here.

We arrive at the Cisco campus and then we have pass through security which includes having the car scanned for “whatever”. The above photo taken as we wait to pass through the entrance gate and security checks. In the back ground you can see the Cisco Campus which at this time consists of 5 buildings set on a very nicely appointed site. It is located on the outer edge of the city. I can only describe the campus as an oasis as the atmosphere is a total contrast to the noise and confusion of the city as we experienced it during the journey.

Flight timing to and from Bangalore are not that sociable. I plan to work in the hotel for most of the day and then try to get some sleep before I head back to the airport for my flight which departs at 4.15am on Friday. This will see me back home at about 4.30pm GMT of course there is a time difference of 5.5 hours so the total journey time is oer 17 hours consisting of three flight as follows Bangalore – Dubai, Dubai – Birmingham and Birmingham – Aberdeen.

I think that I will be ready for a good sleep when I get back home for the weekend. Hoping to make some more progress on the garage of course! – I think that the builder plans to work on it over the next couple of days, weather permitting, which will hopefully see the gable wall completed right up to the roof level ;-).