Life in Bangalore – of Chai, writerly pursuits and concerts galore
That is because a lot has been happening over Chai, at the new firm I am working at.Do check us out on Facebook and be a fan already!
A six day week at work has made life hectic and intense, but immensely fun at the same time. The Bangalore love that I was displaying to bore the living daylights out of anyone that cared to listen still exists, lousy traffic and some weird encounters notwithstanding.
The weather is still wonderful and I get to work on my laptop on a comfortable bus with my data card while in transit. Pick up a Volvo pass – the darn thing costs INR 1500 and is worth its weight in gold.
The expression on the faces of people that speak to me in Hindi only to be asked if they don’t know Kannada in turn is also as priceless as ever. While travel has taken a backseat, a Gurgaon trip is on the cards to reacquaint myself with the awesome North Indian winter and with good friends that were the reason that Gurgaon seemed like a crazy fun ride when it lasted.
Next up was representation in the mountains and beaches special issue in Mint Lounge, where my piece on Dharamsala / McLeodganj was published. My second article in Mint and a big thanks to Aadisht for helping out with that.
Another awesomely thrilling moment came by when my piece on Jerusalem’s Museum on the Seam was published in the Sunday Guardian.
Very little blogging, but the writing adventures continue unabated. Unparalleled joy with the strong hope that more such opportunities will come my way with greater frequency and that I will have the time to do justice to it all.
On a particularly rainy Sunday afternoon, I made my way to ITC Gardenia where the “F1 rocks” event was introduced to a few members of the press and we were informed, amid copious plugs of Vladivar vodka about the impending visit of Metallica at the end of October.
A little redundant, considering how every metal fan that had supposedly outgrown the band is now suddenly jizzing his pants and mondegreening “For whom the bell tolls” with “For whom the benchod” and saying how nothing else matters.
October promises to end with a bang and here’s hoping that it all passes by smoothly. I am writing two posts (currently in draft mode) about surviving concerts and about handling Bangalore autos and I’d like them to see the light of day as soon as possible. Wish me luck and watch this space!
The discovery of JP Nagar
Sometimes, when I work from home, I take a break in the afternoon by taking a fifteen minute walk around this place and that helps recharge my batteries brilliantly. The high that I get from being so comfortable in the afternoon sun continues to maintain the extreme love I have for the Bangalorean weather.
JP Nagar phase 2 reminds me of Hogwarts in some ways. There’s small alleys and roads within the Marenahalli area that have shops and random eating joints that show up out of the blue sometimes and can’t be located at all on other occasions.
There is a certain delight in walking less than 100 metres from one’s house to discover within that radius a movie hall that shows ONLY Telugu movies (including a dubbed version of ‘Return of the King of the Rise of the Planet of Apes’ or some such), an MTR eating joint that is visited even by bovine customers, a north Karnataka food store, a bakery, a clothes ironing store, a cycle repair shop, a grocery store and a couple of temples.
During my first month of living here, I have realized that I can successfully postpone the thought of setting my kitchen up, given the plethora of eating options within a 500 meter radius, most of which are actually easy on the wallet too. Or maybe after the expensive eating options of my native place Gurgaon, the relative reduction in price per meal has been quite easy to digest. Notice the cute pun there?
The mixed-up alleys have resulted in an impulse-based scoping out of all the food joints, instead of a sequential approach towards sampling all the places. However, the time is ripe for me to embark upon a discovery of JP Nagar, the proper way.
Reading books on war strategy and in-city combat has certainly had a direct impact on my approach to tackle the food discovery situation. I now have a map complete with markers and an excel sheet tracker that I have used to record various parameters such as name of place, location, food item(s) ordered, price per meal, satisfaction ratings, turn-around time and such.
The importance of being earnest in data collection hasn’t ever been as evident, as far as I am concerned.
Just so you know, the sort of places I am scouting out comprise the whole gamut of food options, including Coffee Day, Subway, McDonalds, KFC, Daily Bread, The Great Kebab Factory, Nandhini and other such places, to the hole in the wall juice shops, the dal + chawal + roti + subzi + salad + pickle joints, the darshinis and others.
All this for science and progress. Nobody said it was easy, but I’ll take it up from the start.
Back in Bangalore, Back to Bedlam
I had lived in Bangalore until 31st March 2009, following which, I had lived in Hyderabad and in Gurgaon. Two years and four months of traipsing around has made me realize that Bangalore is the most comfortable Indian city for me to live in (with the exception of Mysore, which is beyond any list, in just the same way as those that you love are excluded from any best-of lists that you’d compile).
After a sixteen month stint in Gurgaon that involved multiple visits to Mysore, with Bangalore being my transit point, I was sufficiently enticed to be part of the returning diaspora and discard the quite crazy, albeit highly entertaining life up north in search of salubrious climes, moderated lifestyles and armed with a yearning to grow roots in a particular place.
For the most part since I moved out of home seven years ago, I’ve always felt this strong feeling of transience that accompanied my stay at most of the places I lived in, including Gurgaon. Previously, I was keen on studying further and as a result, chose not to get fully committed to a particular place by making huge investments in home appliances, in renting a comfortable house and settling in, because I knew that this wouldn’t last forever. The same happened in Hyderabad because of studies and was happening in Gurgaon as well.
Gurgaon seemed like a wonderful place with which you could have numerous one night stands, but didn’t seem like a place one could enter into a long term relationship with. Of course, YMMV.
Bangalore, on the other hand is comfortable, familiar, promising and is close enough but not too close to my hometown and was thus the most obvious place to settle in. It does have its cons – bad traffic, mediocre infrastructure ripped apart by the construction of the metro and has a way of life that I still at some level consider too fast paced for my Mysorean demeanour.
However, Bangalore is also a place that is supremely chilled out. It lets you be. It allows you to wallow in your sloth and throws things at you that you can choose to dodge or embrace wholeheartedly. It is placed beautifully at the appropriate intersection of the NED and the GTD mindsets.
On Sunday, the only day off for me in the new job I am at, I took a walk around where I live. The sidewalk is dug up on the main road and with the rains, it is quite inconvenient to walk around. But I took a long, 5 km walk all around JP Nagar in order to scout for furniture to setup a home office and to pick up essentials for my new place and was able to get everything except for nice laundry baskets and an appropriately priced carpet for my living room.
Walking around, I discovered this seedy hotel near Sarakki layout where I had lived at in September 2004 when I’d just arrived in the city. My first firm had put me and the other new joinees there, unaware that there were unsavoury characters who walked the hotel corridors at night, scaring the daylights out of fresh engineering graduates who were trying to engage in whispered conversations with their then girlfriends who lived in other cities not so far away.
As I passed it by, listening to ‘Summer’ by Joe Hisaishi from one of my favourite mp3 mixtapes of all time by Beatzo, I was glad that I would never have to live in that stupid hotel again. I also realized how, just like that long walk I took on that beautiful Sunday afternoon, things have a way of coming full circle, but that time separation shall ensure that the twain shall never meet. Mercifully so.
On my first day in Gurgaon, as I walked into cybercity, not knowing what to expect, I was listening to Winding Road by Bonnie Sommerville, hoping that someday I’d find my way home. That song eventually became such a big influence that it crept into my limited musical repertoire for party entertainment as well.
As I stood at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on 31st December 2010, I prayed for “next year in Bangalore”. Apt, since my wish of wanting to spend “next year in Jerusalem” was already granted.
I’m glad my prayers were answered. It is good to be back in Bangalore and back to bedlam.
First Job Memories: Fun Times at a Browsing Center
Truth be told, my first job was one that I had soon after I had completed class 12.
In July 2000, I’d taken the Karnataka CET and was waiting for the engineering admissions to begin. There was the usual bullshit that accompanied seat allocation in engineering colleges and some ranking revision to add to the mayhem.The confusion led to delays in the process which eventually led to a delay in the start date of all courses. My class 12 board exams had been done with by 24th March and the CET exams were also done by 9th of May.
I had nearly five months of blissful unemployment and I wasn’t sure of what to do. Mooching off my folks to do something outrageously random was out of the question. What helped my situation, in retrospect, was the fact that I wasn’t quite cognizant of the gravity of the situation and that while most of my contemporaries seemed to have a plan, I was quite content with just drifting and seeing how four years of engineering college turned out.
I wasn’t looking forward to it too much, to be honest. Having chosen electronics and communication as my major after using the tried and tested method of ‘inky-pinky-ponky’ at the seat selection process in Bangalore, I was quite unsure of what to expect.
However, seeing so many people that would qualify as borderline retards getting through the course before me gave me enough solace. The only thing I was reasonably certain of, if nothing else was my intelligence. In retrospect, I shouldn’t even have ruminated and wasted that amount of time, dabbling away in uncertainty.
Five months and nothing to do. It was around that time that I began discovering the internets, with browsing centers mushrooming all over Mysore. Some of them were offering decent hourly rates and I chanced upon one such that was slightly far away from home, but was cheap enough to offset the pedaling distance that I had to cover both ways on my trusty bicycle.
Inspired by all the books I read about kids having summer jobs, I decided to get one for myself and to that effect, I spoke to the owner of the 24 hour browsing center, that was also doubling up at Mysore’s first internet service provider. The browsing center was located in Kuvempunagar in a house, with the computers on the ground floor and what passed off as the corporate office on the first floor.
The owner was caught off-guard by the fact that I just walked into his cabin and said that I wanted to make some pocket money in the summer. I was then introduced to the staff and was asked to work Mondays through Saturdays for at least eight hours. I was allowed to drink all the coffee I wanted and I could browse for free. At the end of each month, I was promised a princely sum of INR 750 and I was kicked beyond belief.
Some of the most interesting times I have ever had at a job have been during the one month that I spent there.
There was Rakesh, the owner of the place who was a sound and sensible chap, whose hiring methods seemed suspect after I had spent one day at the job. The other people that worked there seemed like characters straight out of a loony bin.
Firstly, there was B, the accountant lady who had a perpetually surly expression on her face. Whoever was managing the browsing center and allocating PCs for customers to surf at was required to record the time. B would tally the books at the end of each day, collect money and sign off to close books for the day. She was unnecessarily rude to me at the outset, but warmed up enough to discuss problems and tell me about how the other people at the office would bitch her out and how her folks wanted to get her married soon. One particular evening, she narrated her situation while getting teary-eyed and I remember telling her that I was seventeen and that I didn’t know what to do or say.
There was P, the cocky, self-assured chap who had setup the systems. He would regularly snoop to look at what other people were browsing on and occasionally meddle with people’s computers using WinVNC from the main system that used to monitor the connections. When I told him that he wasn’t doing the right thing, he told me to get lost and mind my own business.
Being a 24 hour browsing center, there were occasions when I’ve been present overnight and certain others when I’ve woken up as early at 5 AM to cycle in pitch darkness along the edges of Kukkarahalli lake in Mysore to get to work.
If the staff was full of people straight out of the funny farm, the customers were a few notches above, insofar as their level of crazy was concerned. I encountered the Indian version of the perpetually online slobs that were addicted to the internet. These guys, that were part of the great unwashed, actually had food stuck in their beards and would spend eight to ten hours straight browsing away late at night.
The browsing center was frequented by a few chaps that wanted seats whose monitors weren’t visible to the others so they could peacefully access gay porn sites (I know this because the parent system would display what sites were being visited by each user). There were other people that were addicted to internet relay chat to a point where they’d browse all night, sipping away on endless cups of coffee that I’d deliver to their browsing stations on a tray.
On the flip-side, there were people that were genuinely interested in trying out ‘this internet thing’ as they’d come and tell me, and I take pride in having setup the first email address for many a newbie web-surfer. In fact, a few months after I quit this job, I was asked by my class 12 biology teacher to help her navigate the web.
I learnt a lot of stuff on my first job. Most of it good, some of it bad. It helped me understand people better and exposed me to individuals that I wouldn’t have encountered in my (until then) sheltered existence. I got my first paycheck and I learnt that internet usage and browsing can be monitored extensively even if browsing histories are deleted. This has taught me to never, ever, ever, ever, ever open a website that I didn’t want traced back to me in a corporate setup. Surf p0rn only at home, basically.
I quit the job after a month because I joined guitar classes and I wasn’t able to juggle class and work at the same time. Simultaneously, I’d stopped having fun there. I’m surprised by how 17 year old Hari knew when to call it quits, because as I’ve grown older, I’ve had some trouble discontinuing stuff when I have stopped enjoying myself. Not anymore, though.
In retrospect, the decision to quit and continue with guitar classes turned out to be the best decision ever, thanks to all the good times that knowing to play the guitar brought about in my life.
Why Google+ holds promise
Google+ seems promising, for me at least. This is why:
- I don’t need to open a separate browser window. I google millions of things each day and having a tab on top to help stay in touch is effective.
- Google has had a previously built up reputation of erring on the conservative side so far as user privacy is concerned, save for when it got all ‘Buzz’ed up. Facebook, on the other hand seems to have had a policy of “We know it might annoy our users. Let’s implement and enforce it. If we are pushed back, we can go ahead and tweak features to reduce privacy-related complaints.“
- The prima facie logical grouping in circles (already present on facebook, but somewhat painful to manage on its UI) might help make communicating between different groups more effective, given how our personal circles are expanding at a considerable rate.
- With all the good, positive ways that google has used to help change lives as we know it (not drastically, but in small, cumulative ways that add up to be greater than the sum of the constituent parts), this would help too. Admit it, the odds of staying in touch with and subsequently putting blade on (hitting on) people you’ve met in real life has increased drastically since the time of Orkut previously, though Facebook has now taken that role up effectively.
- Lastly, do check this video out. I quite like the soft, lilting background music interspersed with voice-overs that has me sold completely on Google+.
Granted, it will be a pain to migrate from FB to google, but I’m sure there’s ways and means that this product will have to facilitate a smooth transition.
With Amazon hitting the Indian shores, there’s enough heat being generated in the domestic front along with this battle between Google and Facebook to keep us all intrigued on the competitive strategy front.
I think it is time to sit and re-read my Competitive Strategy course pack from B-school, this time without exams in mind and with more relaxed time lines to boot.