I’m writing this in reverse chronological order because it’s easier to remember things this way.
You can see my random photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/rrandor
Night before last I got back late in the evening after a bus tour of Bangalore and my bathroom was thrashed. There were feces, toothpicks and dirty footprints all over the bathroom. A couple dozen eggs and a jar of garlic spread were broken all over the kitchen along with dirty footprints. I immediately suspected the kitten because I had been warning Anoop about keeping her out of the kitchen. But I realized she would have had to achieve certain acrobatic feats that were impossible. Then I saw a baby monkey outside the kitchen window. This is nine floors up! I had left the bathroom window cracked open and there is construction scaffolding still in place. The monkeys apparently had taken up residence on the roof 14 floors up. I wonder what they’ll do once the scaffolding is removed. So yesterday I spent the morning cleaning up after the monkey attack.
A large Rama temple that we visited on the tour, may have had close to a 1000 m of vendor stalls in the circuitous maze on the way out, selling everything from food to books to clothing to toys to tchotchkes to blue baby dolls. It really made me appreciate the fact that Vipassana centers sell nothing. I wonder if, when Jesus threw the moneylenders out of the temple he also threw out the bobble-head doll vendors.
The Lalbagh botanical garden was spectacular with massive trees. One could spend days there. There was a flower show that was a little kitschy to keep the kids interested, but the flowers were beautiful. There too were hundreds of vendor stalls, but they were segregated into certain areas and could be avoided.
The science and technology museum was well done but you could see the abuse of millions of schoolchildren.
I’m sitting on the balcony of an apt near the Manyata Tech Park, the guest of Anoop who stood me up at the airport when I arrived in Bangalore. I’m experiencing life in a gated community Indian style. His kitten and I are entertaining each other. It has just learned that it can’t run through a plate glass door. There are something like 10,000 IBM employees here in Bangalore. Anoop manages 400 in a call center for an Australian energy company.
It was a three-hour commute to cover 30km to get here during the rush-hour, because I followed the advice of Google maps and took a direct route through the city (est. time 1 hr 43 min) instead of following a ring road. I did that mainly cuz I couldnt figure out their software user interface. I knew downtown wouldnt be pretty. But as usual I met nice, helpful Indians who advised me along the way. One was an entrepreneur starting a software franchise in Hyderabad. We shared an autorickshaw (about like a riding lawnmower, but not as sturdy) downtown. The next man was an IT manager for a large French supermarket chain. Made sure I got all the way to my destination, going out of his way. I had my backpack and rolling suitcase. In the dark we had to jump a fence and cross a railroad track where there was no crossing. Just part of a normal commute for thousands of people.
Earlier in the day I’d been helping out Varun at his trade show at the KTPO (Karnataka trade promotion organization) convention center. He is a designer for the Louis-Philippe line of clothes. He’s been working for six months on the latest line of suits that will reach the stores in August. It it all led up to intensive preparation for the tradeshow that was causing all his fellow workers and directors to freak out. One thing I never thought I’d be doing in India is aiding and abetting the fashion industry. LP is a brand owned by Aditya Birla. Its production is only located in India. It gives the impression that it’s totally western; all the models are entirely white, not a single brown face to be found. Louis Philippe refers to King Louis Philippe of France, who restored the monarchy after the upstart revolutionaries and Bonapartists; a very patrician image.
United Colors of Benetton has no traction in India apparently. India has internalized its former colonization totally. It works for and against me as a white guy. I pay the Firengi (foreigner) tax at times but I also can do things and go places that a brown face cant, if I have a little chutzpah.
Aditya Birla is a $40 billion grossing company. One of its 20-some subsidiaries owns LP, Allen Solly & Van Heusen brands. You may have heard of their shirts. Varun says they’re exclusively focused on the bottom line. He wants to develop an indigenously produced environmentally sound product line, like Khadi which was inspired by Gandhi’s idea of village technology.While I was there he was working on his portfolio which he sent to a fashion school in New York. We figured he’d need start his own company and sell 10,000 m of cloth every year for five years to pay for two years of schooling. He wants to break out of the Indian fashion ghetto.
Last night that I was at his house, we and his two roommates Rohit and Lenold, had dinner at a new branch of a restaurant that was opening up nearby called Empire. It is basically like any other upper-end (cleaner, more marble and more factotums) Indian restaurant except they had political connections that allowed them to stay open past curfew. The kids were happy to hear that they would be able to order for delivery until midnight. The typical habit is to eat at 9 – 10 o’clock at night. Rohit’s an accountant for a large Arthur Andersen type company. Lenold is doing marketing for a startup Internet company.
Afterwards while they had a smoke, I tried paan for the first time. Never was tempted before cuz I thought it meant chewing betel nut. No turn-off like seeing someone with corroded dark-red teeth and black gums. And eating something smeared on a leaf with a dirty finger is not apetizing. Turns out paan can have just about anything in it: tobacco, betel nut, etc. Our “dessert” paan had sweetened rose petals with a maraschino cherry, covered with silver leaf (a common coating to Indian sweets). Pretty tasty.
The nice thing about being unemployed, I now have time to explore the news on commondreams.org and listen to podcasts. There’s a great series of articles on the Der Spiegel site about the technology behind how NSA is spying on us all. Includes even a catalog of products put out by NSA, like a usb cable that broadcasts to a briefcase wifi hotspot! If you have to ask you cant afford it. We all cant afford it.The New York Times just glossed over it in their article.
One of the pictures I uploaded is of a monster Hanuman (Hindu monkey god, servant to Ganesh) statue over six stories tall in HSR Layout suburb. It’s a case of size does matter. Ther Hanuman Temple was overshadowed by an adjacent mosque that you can see in the picture, so to prove that their God was better than the competiton they built this massive statue. In your face.
I went to a homeopath in the Wilson garden suburb to deal with my infected tooth. She couldn’t help. Homeopathy seems to be poorly practiced here in South India. There are companies, such as Positive Homeopathy, that practice assembly-line packaged combination homeopathy, but little in the way of individualized homeopathy. So after knocking down the infection with antibiotics I think I can handle it on my own. The worst that can happen is I’ll be no worse off than I was originally and I will have to have it pulled. I’ve been ok for the last two weeks.
One thing that I have this time that I didn’t have the previous times I visited India is a good MP3 player. It keeps me entertained and drowns out all the noise of an Indian city. It may sound like the gross practice of an insensitive tourist but once you’ve heard the dogs barking, TATA the trucks & buses roaring and approximating their gears, the tuk-tuks (onomatopoeia for the rickshaws) and the continuous cacophony of horns you will understand. I’m not missing anything. But I do have to keep my awareness of threats such as dogs, gaping holes in the panels that cover the sewage ditches, traffic and pickpockets.