Back from India

I’m back home from a week in Bangalore, India. It was a work trip but we did get one day to have a bit of a look around. Some quick points about Bangalore, from my observations:

• traffic is crazy – cars, rickshaws, bikes, motorbikes, all weaving in and out of their lanes, horns honking constantly. 5 cars wide on a 2 lane road, no problems. Not enough space on your side of the road, no worries, start a new lane on the other side.
• food is great – I love Indian food, and yes the Indian food in India is much the same as what we get in Indian restaurants here (unlike Chinese food in China vs in Chinese restaurants in Australia)
• cricket IS a religion. Everyone was talking about the Indian Premier League games, and the news on TV often had cricket as a lead story, and always had a good 10 minutes out of a 30 minute bulletin. There was also a show called “Cricket-tainment”.

• counting for the Karnataka state elections was on the day we arrived. The TV coverage was like a cricket match, with the seats being awarded to the parties being tallied towards the target. The downside of the election day was that the whole state was “dry” for the day – no alcohol permitted to be sold in hotels and restaurants.
• I actually arrived on the first day of operations of the new Bengaluru International Airport – word of advice …avoid brand new airports, wait till they have their act together. On arrival we sat on the tarmac for about 30 minutes while waiting for the gate we were supposed to be at, to be cleared by another plane. But departure was worse. First you line up to get in the terminal, having to show security your passport and a ticket/itinerary (they were only letting passengers into the terminal). Then check-in, 45 minutes wait to get to the front of the line (which had only about 20 people in front of me), line up again to pay the airport tax, then get the receipt for that punched by another guy to get into the immigration queue, then wait there, another guy to check passport and boarding pass before getting into the security queue, then another to check that I had a tag on my carry-on bag, then through the scanner, then scanned by hand with one of those wand things, then got the tag on my bag stamped to say I’d gone through security (after making me get my laptop out after my bag had already been scanned and scanned the bag sans laptop again). But that wasn’t all. I bought a book in a shop there, and at the cash register had to show my passport and boarding pass which the cashier dutifully typed the details of into his computer. But not only that, he insisted he had to give me change in dollars rather than rupees – so now I’m the proud owner of $US1. But there’s still more, after a stop at the Pizza Hut and a bar, boarding the plane involved going through two more security guys who checked passport, boarding pass and that the tag on my bag had been stamped by the earlier security guys. Then finally we got held up while the passenger headcount got done about 3 times before it reconciled with the records. This made us about 40 minutes late which was concerning to me as I only had a 50 minute connection time in Singapore (fortunately there were several people making the same connection so in the end they held up the second flight long enough for us to make the transfer)

Fruit shopping Indian style

More traffic:

and finally, a message to encourage and motivate public servants.

(The motto on the building says “Government work is God’s work)