Diwali

Diwali in Bangalore was awesome. A continuous suppy of food kept us happy and of course an opportunity to meet and spend time with family.

On the negative side, it was amazing to experience the noise levels :-). The worst part was reading those Diwali accidents which cause life-long injuries and most of them which are avoidable with a little bit of care and being aware of your surrounding.

Where do you belong ?

NYT carried this blog-post on a NRI who returned back to India only to return back to US again.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/why-i-left-india-again/

While I don't agree with all the opinions in the blog, I am impressed at the author's courage to highlight what prompted the move. As the comment suggest, it is easy to be judgmental about the author and his views and most of the comments make a personal attack on his character.

At the end of day, you gotta be where your heart is !

Namma Metro

Finally, "Namma Metro" is functional, however small the stretch is, it is still symbolic achievement and has the potential to catapult Bangalore into more development and an easier commute for lakhs of Bangaloreans.

Of all the news articles, the link below probably summed it up really well (http://business-standard.com/india/news/for-that-smooth-ride-home/453294/)

The skeptic across the city warns that "Namma Metro" will not really help that much, but it is really great to see a world class urban transport system come to Bangalore. We just had to keep it clean and shiny for years to come. Once the entire stretch across the city becomes operational, it has great potential to reduce the commute time.

The biggest boon as I see it is that this will allow the city to stretch beyond the existing borders and gradually move into the US style urban development, where a big city has a downtown (commercial zone) and then a more residential suburban layout.  The problem as I see in the past few years where Bangalore has seen rapid development has been that as city got richer, the people wanted to move to the interiors which doesn't really scale well. The concept of satellite township bordering a big urban area has a been pushed for a long time, but the two critical components for this to be successful are just falling in place now. The first is the world-class urban transport which would ferry people into the city. The second is a world class road network which would take people to their homes in the satellite townships.

Hopefully, "Namma Metro" will decongest Bangalore and make it a better place to stay !

Murphy's law...

...yesterday was one of those days where all things which could be wrong did go wrong.

In order of events :

1. The DSL line decided to go dead.
2. The router decided to go dead.
3. The subscription on my mobile broadband had run out.

Essentially, an outage with no way of getting on the internet. While it is problem of out of your control, the bigger issue is finding the right folks to fix the problem.

The customer service for most of these are not really world-class. While companies like Comcast take outages seriously, this is not really case for a ordinary connection (I do hope it is better for business customers). In most cases, you need to call a few folks before a outage is registered and the issue solved. To their credit, inspite of the lack of coordination, DSL outage took around 12 hours to be fixed.

The next problem is discovering where services are located. To renew the mobile subscription, you need to find the right 'shop' to pay and renew. This is not a trivial task especially the first time. It took me an hour to find the right place and more often than not, you need to hop from one shop to another and you get redirected to the next place where you might get the 'service' you need. Conceptually, this mirrors the way HTML links are designed :-)

In short, it took me around 10 hours to recover from a outage, hopefully, it is one of a kind and does not repeat too often....

Simple perks..

As an engineer, you really don't have to dress up. An old pair of jeans and a few T-shirt works just fine. Add a jacket to cover the cold weather, you can live an entire winter on that  wardrobe.

That also makes me lazy. Being in Seattle and being an engineer, I never spent enough time on my  wardrobe and of course I hate ironing.

So, for the first time ever, I got my entire wardrobe neatly ironed and it looks awesome.

All for 250 Rs, around 5$ :-). I'm set for more than a month.

Queue-ing

This is nothing new, I guess - queues in India work differently.

I've been spending time in the queues in a few places over the last few weeks (queues in banks, queues to get into parking lot, queues in government offices). It is amusing how folks react in queues.

Firstly, most folks really don;t like the idea of standing in a queue - most of us have that entitlement that queues are for 'others'. The first thing I'm sure most people think about when they see the queue is 'how the heck do I get to the front' - which is where the concept of a queue breaks down.

The queues tend to be compact, compressed and literally, you can have (unwanted) physical contact. There are the perpetual 'jumpers' who find that extra-ordinary excuse to get to the front (more often than that it tends to start with - 'I have a one minute request'). When reminded about the 'jump', some folks give up with a whimper, while the bold ones try to substantiate why they need to be at the start of the queue.

I sometimes feel that somehow people think that just getting as near as possible to the queue counter will help them get the work done faster. It is more of an instinctive reaction to push, hustle and get to the front.

The other annoying is the multi-tasking at the queue counter. Instead of servicing one customer at a time, the people on the other side invariably try to help more than one customer at the same (i.e multi-task) and that really doesn't help.

I just hope that we drill this into our kids - 'stand in line, get your work done and get out as fast as possible, it is just that simple'....

Wrong Place...

If there is one place you really don't want to be in, is to be in an ambulance stuck in Bangalore traffic. I have seen few times when an ambulance is trying to maneuver through the Bangalore traffic at peak hours and it is not making any progress. Last week, on the way to the airport, we were driving right behind an ambulance for more than 3 kms at snail pace(with a patient inside). Unfortunately, with all the construction and changes happening, the choices are restricted in terms on how much space a ambulance or any utility vehicle can get. I'm sure there have been a few lives lost because of this.

While construction is a good excuse, I'm sure there are some common-sense things a drivers on the road could do to at-least make sure the ambulance gets a priority on the way to its destination. I'm sure in  few years, we will see heli-lifts to dispatch patients to the emergency care.

Sometimes, I feel that army should be entrusted care of traffic for a a while to just drill discipline  & common-sense into the drivers and instill the fear of the devil if anyone breaks the rule :-). The pot-bellied traffic police manning the road don't really serve any cause.

Deals..

If you have stayed in the US for a long time, you are tuned to looking out for 'deals'. Deal is any offer which is unusual, obviously gives a big discount and is an event where you look back and feel satisfied that you didn't have to shell out as much money as your friend or neighbour. Thanksgiving sale, X-mas sale or that super saving JC penny sale are examples of these.

The other type of deal is when you get a great price, but you get locked in a contract for an extended period of time - but then you console yourself saying that you got a great 'deal' upfront. For example, we buy that cool phone for 80% off retail (but we are locked in a 2-year contract with that data plan which we don't use). Or we have that Comcast deal where you get 30$ off on your monthly bill, but then need to have subscription for more than a year. Or you can get a Dish installed for free if you have yearly subscription.

The reason I have been mentioning this is that pricing I have seen in India seem to be lot less complex. If you feel like getting rid of your cable connection, you can do that after a month. If you don't like getting tied with a cell phone provider, you can buy pre-paid cards and change when you wish too. If you don't feel good with your broadband connection, just switch without being worried about anything else.

The other thing is buying a car is stress-free as far as price is concerned. The base price for the car is the same everywhere (across all show-rooms). So you don;t the have stress of dealing with a pushy car-salesman, comparing the prices across different show-rooms and then being worried if you are really getting that 'good deal'. You can safely sign that cheque for the car knowing that everyone else is paying the same amount of money.

Of course, the Indian model will change in the long term - but for now, I don't have to worry about those 'deals' :-)

Cars...

As I mentioned here, we are in the market to buy a new car. The car industry is booming out here and the abundance of choices are really confusing for a new customer.

Four important criteria for us :

1. Mid-size vs Sedan. A sedan is the equivalent of a VW Jetta, Honda City, Hyundai Verna vs a mid-size which is Hyundai I20, VW Polo etc. A mid-size has lesser boot space and lesser leg room in the back-seats. 
2. Petrol vs Diesel - everyone recommends a diesel engine now-a-days, with the petrol prices increasing. 
3. Automatic vs Manual - automatic is just making inroads in India and my guess-estimate is that less 10% of the vehicles are automatic.
4. New vs Second-hand - no one locally recommends a second hand car !

Price of course is a big factor - a car is a dead investment. 10-12 years ago, I would have laughed at this, but you become wiser with age :-).

The traffic on the road and the crawl factor during peak hours makes automatic a big convience. Maneuverability is another concern given the parking woes (see link), a smaller car makes sense . A diesel engine would cost approximately 75,000 more than a petrol engine. My rough calculation says that you recover the initial upfront costs within the first 2800 kms, after which the diesel engine is definitely wins in the cost of the ownership.As for second hand cars, the biggest problem is the trust factor. While in the US, it is easy to detect a lemon, India does not have equivalent rules and regulation to detect vehicles which have been through accidents or any other problems.

So it looks like it is going to be a mid-size, automatic, diesel, first hand car (hopefully) !!

Test Drive

We are in the market to buy a car. One of the pretty neat concepts, at-least for me is that we really dont have to drive down to the car dealership to drive one of the new cars. All you have to do is call them up and one of the salesman will arrive at your door-step and you can drive the car around. And the salesman would also run through the car features and other details. Pretty cool. It saves you time to get down to the dealership and of course it is a hassle-free experience.

The bad side is that if you stay within the city, you really cant get the highway feel for a vehicle.

It amazes me to see the car industry booming given the space constraints. Most people have multiple cars and a large percentage are upgrading to sedans (VW Jetta, Hyundai Verna, Honda City etc). Given that car is not really a good financial investment, it is luxury item (on the balance sheet at least), I'm surprised to see them sell like hot-cakes. The real good cars have a wait time of 4-8 months and you need to plan ahead. If you are like us and looking to buy immediately, the choices go down considerably.

The salesman are paid slightly differently when compared to the US. Each of them have fixed salary approximately 10,000Rs pm and they get 1000Rs for every car they sell. Some of them whom I have been talking do, sell approximately 20-25 cars a month i.e 1 car a day. I guess the average cars sold per salesman is lesser, but still that is a large number of cars ! We better get the roads ready to get this many cars on road.

Of course, second hand cars are not recommended by everyone I'm talking to !

Phone book explosion ...

As I start settling down in Bangalore, I'm having a tough time maintaining my phone book. Mobile has become a neccessity and a convience tool. Everyone in India now carries a mobile phone (starting from the domestic help, the utility workers, professionals besides friends and families).

Some of my phone book entries look like this :
Murli 'Grill'
Ranga 'Carpenter'
Venu 'Insurance'
Marshall 'Cleaner'
Satya 'Driver'
Kamlamma 'House cleaning'
Aarthi 'School'
Pradeep 'Car Sales'
And so on...

Indian names tend to be common - more often than not, we have to associate context to the names. Also, these entries tend to be short-lived i.e they are only useful to you for a particular period. The current phone book tends to be not-so-useful for these. It would be awesome if I could some how categorize these entries based on some activity.  One way I'm organizi'ng these entries is to use the 'notes' section for each of these phone entries (and that allows adding some context to each name)