Bangalore II - 21-28 September

Monday 21 Sept
Woke up much later than planned (oops). Today is a festival day so it's a holiday and the office is closed, though I have to work. I wrestle with the internet connection in my room - which seems to be on holiday too. The nice IT man comes to sort it out and we discover that a cable to this floor needs to be plugged in somewhere. Half an hour later it is sorted out and I am connected to the world again....for about 5 minutes.

It is deathly quiet with my balcony door shut and I find I need a bit of background noise.
Outside there is a huge cloud of dragonflies and a man having a shower on his roof.

Later, I'm delighted to find wireless access by the swimming pool - this is a really good hotel and it goes up even further in my eyes when they bring me a basket of very fat chips in their skins as a present.

This evening's sweets in my room are like undercooked homemade fudge - yummy. I also receive an orange and an apple to add to the grapes, bananas and pear, but I give the chocolates a miss for once.

I tried the South-East Asian restaurant in the hotel a couple of times this week and it was fantastic. I took half an hour to decide what to eat. They do the full range of sushi and sashimi, Thai, Chinese and Korean food - so it is difficult to select.

The papers are full of the fact that the probe from India was the first to discover water on the moon (in June) but the Americans made them keep quiet about it until their probe had done it too!.

Swine flu vaccinations are being given in the office.

We go to a different food court for lunch and I could have had KFC, Subway, Pizza slut, Baskin Robbins or proper food. I join the lengthy queue for North Indian food just as a change from
South Indian (as if I could make the distinction). The Biryiani and something is very nice whatever it is.

Saturday
Today I manage to eat exclusively Indian food for every meal - a milestone. All of it is delicious. I do not want to go home to having to make my own food and not being able to eat this stuff.

At dinner I read in the paper that Suiseki, a Japanese term for stone appreciation is becoming popular - they mean stones selected for aesthetic reasons and kept as object of contemplation, Well at last.

It's the middle of the 10 day long Dasara festivities that is closely associated with Mysore. Originally, the Maharajah of Mysore would come out of the Royal Palace riding on an elephant.
Now the Royal Elephant, beautifully decorated and dressed, carries a gold statue of the goddess Chamundhi in a golden howdah in procession though the streets of Mysore, except it wasn't going to do it whilst I was there. Now Dasara is run as a state festival and it's the only time of year when the royal palace is open and the gold throne displayed. In fact the state elephant, the state horse, the state cow accompanied by the Panchakalasha elephant chariot?, camel and gun carriages are all rolled out for the procession. The elephants are painted with patterns - even their bottoms are decorated. I arrange for my driver to take me to Mysore on Sunday in the hope of seeing an elephant.

Sunday
We left at 06:40 for the trip to Mysore. As we drove through the outskirts of Bangalore, apart from wonering what was the maximum number of people that could fit in a tuk-tuk, (10?) I started seeing piles of cut and trimmed banana plants for sale, plus enormous piles of watermelons. The road was lined with these stalls for miles, and it was the same in every town we passed through along the way. The stalls also sell a basket with three coconuts with yellow flowers tucked in amongst them. The driver explained that these are for Puja, which is a
Hindu religious ceremony meaning the giving of a gift or offering to a deity and receiving their blessing. This one is the Durga Puja and the theme of it is banana trees. Every bus, truck, tuk-tuk, water tanker, and motorbike, plus plenty of cars and a pink Mahindra tractor, is decorated with banana plants and garlands of yellow flowers. Everyone is carrying at least one
banana tree and wearing garlands of flowers. Many of the buses are already covered in paintings, and today they have their windscreens almost entirely covered in flowers, plus the banana plants tied on at each corner and across the bonnet, some add tinsel along the sides too. So it is all very flamboyant. (Sorry no photos).



Mysore is 170km from Bangalore and it takes about 2.5 hours by road. The drive is along a new dual carriageway - but they have put speed bumps in it before and after every village - there's no warning of these, so I imagine it must be a bit of a dangerous drive in the dark. The route is across a plain which is dotted with sudden tall outcrops of rock, and filled with everything agricultural. There were coconut palms, rice paddies, fruit trees, flowering trees, sugar cane etc. Everywhere black and white milk cows forage at the sides of the road or lie down on the grassy central reservation or just wander across the road. There were also long-horned, beige, delicate-footed draught cattle, water buffalo, one pig, then a herd of small black pigs, goats, sheep, white chickens in cages, dogs, monkeys, but not a single cat. There was also a dead body (at least I assumed he was dead) lying half on the central reservation and half in the fast lane. No-one paid it any attention. There were people pushing carts or carrying ludicrous loads on bicycles - usually pots and pans or plastic buckets.

Every village had several stalls selling peeled pineapples, papayas and cucumbers.

First we go to Chamundeshwari temple on the top of Chamundhi Hill on the edge of Mysore. This is 1000m up and has stunning views over the city and the plain.


The road passes through groves of yellow-flowered trees. I found out afterwards that there are 800 steps up and people climb these, or climb 600 of them and then run 2km down. We park near the top and walk the last stretch, past multi-coloured stalls selling all kinds of food, offerings and junk.

It is amazingly colourful. I buy a coconut to drink. Some cattle have been brought to the temple, but don't seem to making the most of it.

It is very crowded and people keep trying to sell me things. I am the only European there. Outside the temple are people selling more flower garlands. There's also a very large wooden carving which has been brought out on a wheeled scaffold to be decorated. The wheels are like the cart-wheels in an Asterix cartoon. A few people are burning pieces of coconut shell and small white cubes of something.


The temple itself is very dark inside but you can see the gold statues and carvings of elephants. It is packed with people paying their respects to the goddess.


After the temple, we drive back down into Mysore, to the Royal Palace. Outside the Royal Palace a tiny girl wearing a frilly red skirt and an evil-looking pair of shades is walking a tightrope to the beat of drums banged by her parents. The Palace is not open! it is closed for another 4 hours! the website had said it would be open. The ground in front of it is clearly laid out for a major event, there are flags and rows cordoned off and lots of police, but no-one is allowed in. I am so disappointed. The Royal Elephant is also presumably still in his stall and not coming out to meet the public without being properly-dresed. I peer through the gates and take a few pictures of the outside of one side of the Palace, but there is not much to see.

The driver suggests I could go shopping for 4 hours, I give him a LOOK. I am here for culture, not retail. I suggest a beer whilst we decide whether to stay or go, it's his turn to give me a LOOK.

Instead, he takes me to the (really ugly) Catholic Church, which is fake Gothic with fake stained glass windows. I am amused by the strings of red lights around the paintings inside, whilst the driver has a go on a friend's motorbike.

I decide to cut my losses and go back to Bangalore rather than hang around for 4 hours until the Palace opens. It is only 11:30. I enjoy the journey though, as there is an endless supply of things to look at on the way. After 2 hours the driver was falling asleep, so we stop for coffee in a dimly-lit old farmhouse. I decline to have any food, though I am starving, as the place is really filthy. Coconut water and a black coffee has to do until we get back to the safety of the lovely Leela. It is very hot and suddenly I long to be in the swimming pool, however, although we aren't far from the city, it takes an hour to crawl through the traffic to the Eastern side. I have seen enough lorries and banana trees for one day.

Bangalore II - 17-20 September

Splash down at 03:46, in the taxi at 04:12, even allowing for being shot in the temple by a masked woman (I cannot work out this part of the immigration process), watching the IBM Smarter Planet video in the baggage hall and a minor diversion : "Excuse me madam, I am sorry to tell you that we've left your luggage in London" "I don't think so, see I have my suitcase right here" frowns at the telex "Heathrow has listed it here as a bag they have lost" No, really it is not lost, I have just picked it from the carousel".

On the 45 minute drive to the hotel, we spend some time in a competition with a lorry carrying two very large chunks of concrete - which would be fine if they had been lashed to the truck in some way. We get past eventually and then drive along a stretch of the road which has flashing red lights embedded in it - encouragingly like party lights.

I am given the last room left in the hotel as punishment for checking in so early. I reviewed the pillow menu and considered whether to make a special order at this time of the morning :
spelt chaff pillow
exclusive neck supporting pillow
horse hair pillow (specially for your child..)
down special pillow
non-allergy bolster
smoker pillow
standard duofill pillow
super soft pillow (popular with lady guests)
chimera pillow (hi-tech cold cured) but in what way it's chimaeric isn't clear
firm pillow
contour pillow
slim pillow
or just goose down pillow

Dawn breaks over the city and it is beautiful.


My car to the office has a plastic turkey standing on the dashboard, and the turkey is surrounded with dried roses. I look at the palm trees rather than the concrete pipes that I was interested in the last time.

I'd forgotten that the traffic police wear rather nice hats - like white stetsons but with one side up and one side down.

Adverts for the Indian Army and Air Force are eveywhere - I especially liked the one which insisted that you didn't even need to complete an application, just turn up to a recruiting day, and ignore the touts - recruitment is totally transparent, and another for the Indian Army Logistics Group which had a picture of some men leading a herd of yaks through the snow. The yaks had no loads though.

Friday
I discover an article about Lean Six Sigma in the newpaper at breakfast, and bring it to the office for my colleagues.
I'd better mention work - today we made a small video, and then I narrowly avoid being sacked (or worse, having to pick up the bill) for flying "out of policy" ie not in the back of the plane. You know what my performance appraisal is going to say this year don't you?

Sunday
I booked to join bangalorewalks.com Victorian walk, so my driver had to pick me up at 6.30am and take me to the starting point for 7am.
We started at Holy Trinity Church on MG road - the officers' church - where we went up the tower and each had a go at bell ringing. What you notice from the memorial plaques inside the church (typical wooden colonial style) is how young so many people were when they died. There was one plaque commemorating three family members who died in 1869 - one drowned in a storm at sea, his wife dies on the voyage back to UK shortly afterwards, and their 23 year old married daughter died in India. Apparently, one in three of the men who came out to India either as soldiers or to seek their fortune, or the women who came out to seek a husband, died.

When we come out, some men are doing the flowers for the service.
Down the road, there's East Parade Church - for other ranks - so it didn't deserve a tower and received a humiliatingly small bell.
The whole of this area was and still is dominated by the military - as one can tell from the road names - Artillery Road, Brigade Road, Cavalry Road. Nowadays this has had the positive effect of ensuring that much of the trees and greenery is preserved, as the bits of land which the military have sold off have been built on immediately.

MG road is dominated by the construction of the new Metro system which will provide about 15 miles of lines and is due to be finished in 2011. Meanwhile, the city centre suffers through the line works and station diggings. Strips of land all along the route have been compulsorily purchased including the front garden of one of the old houses, from which the man will not move, even though a metro station is being built in front of his windows.


Behind MG Road there are still some enclaves of greenery and large houses, plus a school cricket pitch in very poor state (it's also used for dog shows and flower shows).



We learned that the street dogs, which are everywhere and generally look in fine condition, are descended from the hounds brought over by the British for hunting, and left behind when they departed.

Why was Bangalore so important? The British and French fought for control of Mysore state, (which was one of the last pockets of resistance to British domination.
The French realised they couldn't sustain the fight once the Napoleonic War broke out, meanwhile Lord Cornwallis on the British side decided that it would take too long to get permission from HQ to attack and take control (about 2 years for a ship to go there and back), so just went ahead and hoped it would all work out. Fortunately for him, it did. Bangalore was ideally situated as a military base because it was on a hill and it remained a key military base through the late nineteenth century.

More significant in Bangalore's success is the fact that it was the first place in India to work out how to brew beer in a hot country - this was very important to the military for obvious reasons. Before then, beer brewed to withstand the journey and the climate (India Pale Ale of course) had to be shipped out from England. The other thing the military did to address discipline was to encourage English women to come to India to find a husband. Hence Bangalore was party town. In fact Churchill was posted to Bangalore for a couple of years, and apart from still owing the Bangalore Club 13 rupees, whilst he was here he pursued one of the thousands of women who came to India, sadly for Winnie, he was rejected.

Another reason Bangalore was important is that horse-breeding in India was started here. Horses aren't native to India and the trade was controlled by Arabs. Horses, like the British, seemed to like the Bangalore climate. Setting up a horse-breeding operation was equivalent to setting up a car manufacturing operation - strategically important.

Bangalore was also the place from where all of India was first mapped. The National Survey and Mapping Institute was set up in the 18th century and the trigonometric series that covers the entire country from North-South to East-West is apparently some of the best mapping data created in the world. One of the surveyors was a George Everest and you can guess what was named after him.

After history, breakfast. We eat this in the company of an eagle on the 13th floor of a mysterious tower block. I say mysterious because it was not clear whether it was offices, homes or shopping. From the top, the views of the city show very clearly what it must have been like when we owned it. The best trees do indeed belong to an Army garden - but all of it is planned - trees were imported from all over the world with the intention that there should be at least one type of tree in flower each month all over the city. Breakfast is substantial - I manage a couple of savoury doughnuts, some rice noodles arranged as a pancake, a very large Scotch pancake, a vegetable omelette and various chutneys.


Afterwards, it's time to go shopping in Commercial Street. The street is bustling and very untidy. There are lots of puddles and bits of concrete to avoid, plus bikes, cars, tuk-tuks, dogs etc.This is more of a "normal" shopping street, not entirely aimed at tourists and the shopping experience is more relaxed ie they leave me alone for more than a minute. I try on lots of flip-flops and end up buying a cushion cover. The roast sweetcorn smells delicious, but I am full.

I spend the rest of the afternoon at the hotel swimming pool - away from the astonishingly large crowd which has come to eat the Sunday lunchtime buffet - and listen to an Abba tribute band with the left ear and whatever the swimming pool happens to be playing with the right ear. I order a beer and try to concentrate on Zola.

At dinner this evening, I spot an example of my favourite archetypes - European male aged 60+ accompanied by glamorous South-East Asian female aged max 35. You know he is ex-military because he always wears a blazer with a badge to dinner. There was a similar pair at Heathrow in the duty-free, where naturally he was picking up the £200 bill for perfume/makeup. You find them in Gucci anywhere in the world.

I note the reversal of conventional role gendering - chambermaids = male, gardeners = female, doing the flowers for the church = male, though bringing chocolates =male spoilt the theory a bit.

But I am missing my garden at home and what may be happening in it :

I take refuge in one of the four bottles of wine that British Airways pressed on me.

Bangalore I

Collected musings from the weeks's emails to various people :
Sunday
Do you want to come to India? I could do with someone prepared to be a proper chap and say xxxx-wallah a lot. You wouldn't be able to do any "plowing of new furros" though as the cattle lead a priviledged life on the public purse, but you could do a lot of hanging around in bars in your lumberjack shirt.

My tomatoes are going to die whilst I am away, not that they were fantastically productive, but still it is for the third year a travel-related crop failure. I am waiting for a GM version that can withstand no watering for two weeks and still produce plump and rosy ones (so to speak).

back on line again at the opulent Leela Palace, Bangalore. (I am not nearly smart enough for this rather lovely hotel and charming staff).
You know the kind of place - so gigantic it takes you half an hour to walk from your room to the outside, thoroughly over-staffed and over-gilded.


I had to do a bit of work on the plane because I upgraded to Premium Economy and unfortunately the UK Managing Partner (another Liz) was also on board......... even so I couldn't sleep at all, so watched The Boat that Rocked - which is very funny and touching (I cried in the dark of the plane). Bangalore Airport is brand new and very slick - landed at 04:12, in the chauffeured limo to the hotel by 5am. The brief impression I had of the city as we purred along is of trees, military establishments (eg Indian Air Force Dental Services??) and the horn being used continually as a warning, but never as a rebuke - which course is exactly as it ought to be used.

Monday
Slept fitfully from 7 - 13:00, when I was woken by the chamber boys and Lloyds Bank automated card fraud service (they blocked my card when I tried to get some cash out at Bangalore Airport even though I warned them in advance - plonkers). Got up and went out to seek cash and sustenance. Ate a disappointing salad.

...just taken delivery of silver-leaf flecked chocolate truffles (3 large ones).....add that to the other pair of chocolates sitting by my bed, 4 bananas, bunch of grapes and two pears as snacks, plus obviously a mini-bar stuffed with things, I will be quite fat by the time I leave here.

Bangalore is 4.5 hours ahead of UK at the moment - which I find completely disorientating because of the half hour, but probably not as bad as Nepal which is 4.75 hours ahead.

Also confusing is the variety and versatility of electrical sockets - left over from when it belonged to us are those 3 round pin smallish ones, then there are 3 round pin large ones, but I have not yet seen anything actually sporting the plug and plugged in to one, then 50% of sockets are (helpfully) Northern European 2 pin type, and the other 50% have anything up to 8 holes of various shapes and sizes and accept European plugs (sometimes UK 3 pin if you ram it in hard enough as Kenneth Williams might have said).

Tuesday
At the breakfast spread this morning I bumped into a UK colleague whom I last saw in 2007 or 2008 when we taught a course together in Paris. As he is Scottish and his co-tutor (whom I also know) is flying back home to Hungary on Sunday, I know I will have people who enjoy a beer or two to go out with on Saturday night. In the hotel last night I had one glass of wine with dinner, ok a large one, but it cost about £12. eek.

Today, disregarding my kind and thoughtful American colleagues' warnings not to eat or drink anything at all whilst at the office, I went to lunch with my new team mates and had an excellent plate of selected curries which was £1.50 from a caff. Several of my new colleagues brought their tiffin.....yes really, proper food cooked by their wives that morning and carried in a special cylindrical insulated carrier - far better than a cheese and pickle sandwich. I also drank 2 espressos from the office coffee machine. Said US colleagues ate only packets of tuna and mayonnaise and granola bars they'd brought with them from the US, plus items snitched from the breakfast buffet. The loos are cleaner than in the office in London. Notices about swine flu are everywhere and in the papers, daily reports on those in dire straits from the infection. I'd not appreciated the seriousness of such a virus in a population where many people are not especially well-nourished or strong.

The cab ride to/from the office was everything I'd expected - people living in rubble cooking over a charcoal fire, huge posh new emporia selling diamonds?, blokes peeing in the weeds, beautiful sareed women in flip-flops, fresh coconut stalls, old shoe stalls, broken pavements; tuk-tuks, scooters, crowded buses, limos, rusty water tankers etc all tangled up and trying to push their ways along the dual carriageways. The traffic didn't seem particularly undisciplined (apart from a bit of over-taking on the inside and the odd u-turn), and definitely not as aggressive as a London traffic jam. Then the Embassy Golf Links Business Park (where all the IT firms have offices) huge new glass blocks, with a bit of landscaping including that dull weedy plant that serves for grass in hot countries, security check points everywhere. I can print to any IBM office printer in the world - just locate country/city/office/floor/printer from our Global Print site, install it and off you go - probably our best bit of office IT - which I am continually delighted by.

Thursday
Oops power cut or did my card key fall out of the slot? no it was a real power cut for 10 secs....and again.

I forgot to mention that at dusk in the hotel gardens a man starts up the insecticide spraying machine and goes about creating a huge fog to kill the mosquitos. He wears earmuffs but not a mask.

More Indian sweets and chocolates have arrived in my room today - gold-leafed ones this time. I also got the Times of India and read about swine flu (they report individual's battles from the hospital beds)

Friday
deep-fried cottage cheese and chilli sandwich for lunch (62.5p), gave my driver a £2.50 tip due to feeling guilty at not employing him for both Saturday and Sunday, squealing bagpipes somewhere in the hotel, £12 for a glass of wine, so I had two.

The biggest hazard here is that being a lone female (and given the flattering semi-darkness of the hotel terrace ) I cannot dine in that sometimes comfortable aloneness and reflect on stuff. Oh no, every single night someone wants me to join him/hims or plonks himself down at my table. "it's ridiculous isn't it people sitting on their own at dinner?" I am too polite to refuse, so have endured two young American medics - who were actually very nice and obviously I don't object to being told I have a fantastic figure - so we spent a few hours in the Library Bar where I had two glasses of wine and a beer which was enough to drink them under the table - then one of them for dinner in very expensive curry place the next night - "can I connect with you in London" [well no you are about 20 years younger than me, and not tempered (in the metal-bashing sense) as I like a man to be] but tonight's one (Swedish, negotiating clinical trials on Indians in public hospitals of some device he'd invented) "look, why don't I get a bottle of wine (so that'd be about £70) and let's go and watch TV somewhere - I'm in 204 that's right near you...." [I retire pleading WORK] was too much.
I looked at Kate Moss modelling her latest collection for TopShop and wondered whether I should get a nose job and wear eyeliner more often.

Saturday:
I slept until 11 as I was so tired after a not terribly productive week (or not as productive as I'd planned it should be), and then trawled the lunch buffet - which is excellent - I could only manage to get through about half of the curry choices and didn't even attempt any of the equally delcious-looking Thai and european food. Then I toured the beautiful gardens (checking carefully for snakes though of course there were none) and allowed myself some hours of lying in the sun by the lovely swimming pool, which I had not had a chance to look at until today. I continued my efforts with Semiconductors and the Information Revolution and finished up with a beer and a cone of chips towards the early dusk. Now I am going to investigate the rather bizarre and very large hotel shopping mall.

I discovered the local wine (which is a great deal less expensive than the imported French wine. The Sauvignon blanc was good, the Merlot over-warm and reminded me of Australian wine 25 years ago, but I couldn't judge it fairly given that it was served at about 27C.

Sunday :
I went on a guided walk in the Lalbagh Gardens. It started at 7am at the foot of Lalbagh Rock and it was cold! but I am in India - it can't be cold? It was cold. The guide had a walking stick, but this was not because he needed it, but to tackle snakes. (oh no). The previous week a cobra had crossed the path, and when someone went to look at an interesting tree closely, a snake had shot out from its nest. We have to walk across grassy areas where they live... I am frightened the whole time, but we do not see the slightest sign of a snake.

After three hours of being absorbed by the lovely trees, we repair to the oldest restaurant in Bangalore - Mavalli Tiffin Room - for breakfast. This was very good, and would have been ideal fare had we done a 10 mile uphill run beforehand. We go up a narrow and ill-lit stair, to a series of rather dirty rooms filled with formica-topped tables and lit with naked fluorescent tubes. Only the brave use the bog. The breakfast was substantial - Appam - which is a pasty-shaped white doughy thing flavoured with herbs, Masala Dosa (yummy) - stuffed with fried onions and potatoes, almond milk and pressed grape juice. Then the coffee, which is boiled with milk and served to you in two steel beakers - you are supposed to pour it from one to another until it's cool enough to drink.

Tuesday night :
I turned to log off and was distracted by yet another advert from bharatmatrimony.com :

The lady loves "Aloo Paratha" - I translated that as chip butties. That's one of the interests of the 24 year old lovely who seems to be fronting the ads that I receive on logging in to my yahoo account from here.

You'd think they'd offer me men wouldn't you? you know, in the mid-twenties age group - in order to "train them properly" - or perhaps they have discovered that I am beyond salvation, but would probably serve well enough as a matchmaker.

Do I credit websites with too much insight?

Wednesday :
Spent the day drawing a very large picture on a whiteboard - it was much better than yesterday's picture (which had mostly discrete small barrel shapes) - today's had form, and coloured boxes, and arrows going to places, and some things that could have been fireworks. People nodded and added bits to it - so I thought that was a good result and took a photo of it.

From the ostentation of the local wedding of the year (daughter of Infosys founder) which was held in my 5 star hotel and required the installation of airport-style security, to the shocking realities:
Hotel costs INR 8,500 (£106.25) at the discounted corporate rate, glass of Burgundy INR 1100 (£12), bottle of water INR 90 (£1.10)
Lunch with IBM colleagues in local buffet restaurants INR90, INR 135 if you choose the non-vegetarian buffet - don't you love that ? "non-vegetarian" rather than "meat". but not a lot more than a quid for more than you can eat. Deep-fried cottage cheese and chilli sandwich 62p.
Average monthly wage in India £400
Read a story in the Times of India about a clerk to the railways who lives on max INR500 a month - £6.25, and can survive on a £1.50 because he sleeps in cemeteries and washes in public loos.

Read another story about a leak of chlorine from a cylinder abandoned in a factory yard nearby a block of flats that happened on Monday. Not quite another Bhopal, and this time the site owner was arrested, but covering it up with some mud and running a hose over it, as the police did, probably isn't an adequate emergency response. A sobering thought.