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.