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.