The Big Bang(alore)

Amazingly I have started enjoying my travels to the various parts of the country now. Last week it was Delhi and today I came back from a quick tour of Bangalore – The IT City in the south. The only choice that we didn’t have was in staying overnight at this place.

With the travelling too much one has become critical about airline services. Since Kingfisher Airlines is set as a benchmark for services, all of them are compared ruthlessly with it. Unfortunately then, I would say, we had a booking with Indian Airlines (IA). Least to say the hostesses were far from presentable baring just one in the early morning flight schedule. Just one of them looked keen in serving the passengers, the rest looked like they were doing a routine job. The food wasn’t too good and there was no inflight entertainment provided like Kingfisher and I must say that the private airlines are taking away all the laurels from this 50 year old airline. OK I know I am asking far more from IA but it has to survive in this stiff competition.

The entire day again went into meeting various practice guys. This was again going to be an exercice in sort of understanding the processess of some online documents. It was nice and enriching for me. I spoke about the ‘hows’ and the ‘whys’ of design implementations. The evening certainly bought some memorable moments because I met Shyam at Leela Barista. I am tempted to call this as ‘Shyam ki Shaam’. We had a long discussion on our careers & personal lives including our impending marriages. In the end we both concluded (rather unanimously) that there’s no decent female left on this planet to call our wife and we should brace ourselves for permanent bachelorhood. We are just too late in ‘booking’ our partner. He presented me with a wonderful Barista Coffee Mug and I am surely going to preserve it for a long time to come. It was a bit difficult to coordinate my meeting with Shyam because I don’t have a roaming network on my cell and I had to make use of the public phone to fix my meeting with him. I am happy that we finally met after a long time. Later he dropped me off at the airport from where I had to catch the Jet Airways flight back to Mumbai. Jennifer from Jet Airways if you read this passage someday — It was really nice to meet you & I would like to see you again in the future. I hope you remember me then.

A few words for Bangalore — uptil now I had been reading Indian Express’ crusade on saving Bangalore from the infrastructure melt-down that it’s facing. I actually experienced it today. It took us more than an hour in the traffic snarl to reach our destination. I had also been fore warned of not travelling too far distances within the city to avoid traffic jams unless I really wanted to because it will make my journey back to the airport difficult & unpredictable. Infact one of my colleagues told me that the office timings have been changed to 8 am from 10 am simply to avoid the rush hour traffic and there is a sense of urgency amongst the employees in the evening to leave early. I really feel sorry for the way the city has been treated so shabbily by the state government. Please Dharam Singhji (chief minister of Karnataka state), do something about it.