Have to tell this…

Well we landed in Bangalore at about 11:30 PM India time. It was a nice feeling to be back home. Only thing was that it was not going to be like that after sometime.

I think India is the only country where the customs does a check on your belongings with an eagle-eye. They mark bags that they think are carrying some valuables and other new stuff. And ya they make you pay for the duty and stuff like that. I really wonder how much it matters if someone gets a digicam or a video cam from outside. I managed to give a cheeky “oh! That’s an old digicam” dialogue and get away with my new canon digicam.

We reached the baggage collection center by around 11:45 PM. I thought ya I should get my bag in the next 5-10 mins and should be home before 12:30 AM, catch up on some sleep and then get to office at the morning. If you have not come to Bangalore airport, it should take the award for the most mis-managed, ill-equipped airport in the whole country. The conveyor is long enough for a 20 seater flight and the area is as big as a 2 standard classroom. Ok, all that is forgiven, but why do the Indian airports have 20 year old tractors pulling the luggage from the plane to the terminal.

We waited for more than an hour for our luggage to reach us. I am sure if they allowed us, we could have gone to the plane, taken it out ourselves in less than 15 minutes. Afterall, the plane is parked some 20-30 feet away. But noone in the airport knows what is happening. The customs guys in that area got the wrath of the passengers. They blamed the Malaysian Airlines and because we could not find anyone from the airline, I think let the blame rest with the airlines. Atleast they wouldn’t pass the buck.

The KLIA is about 50 acres, you take a train to reach the main terminal. But the luggage is there even before you reach. Our own Bangalore airport is couple of hundred square metres in area and we wait for about and hour and half for our luggage to reach us after flying for three and half hours. Customer service is unknown in this industry in India. Please privatize it.

I have put some pics of the KLIA. This is the 5th level. Level 1 has the KLIA express the train that gets you back to the city in 45 mins and the rest of the four floors are shopping malls and ticket counters. Can someone just remake the Mumbai airport with one tenth of these facilities.

Airport Infrastructure

I know a lot has been said about the way our Indian Airports function and how shabby the service is at the airports. The HT carried a very interesting article on the Best Airports in the World. An interesting one to read and you will notice that most of them figuring in the list are in Asia and there are no airports from the US.

I am not surprised. The way the aviation industry has taken off in this part of the world is huge. The US is not the market to look out for in the future. Asia is the future, it is the next business destination.

I have not been to the airports mentioned in the list except Changi airport in Singapore and KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport). They are huge and as friendly as any airport can get. It is like a place where I can come 2-3 hours in advance and spend my time quite leisurely. In fact I think KLIA is better than Changi. One reason is that it is quite new and has been built at a place which is like a good 45 minute drive from the city. And when I say a 45 minute drive, please note that the taxis normally go at about 120-135 kmph. So thats a good 90 odd km away from the city.

You get out of the plane, board the KLIA express, do a nice 3-4 minute ride over the landscaped airport and reach the main terminal. Do the immigration and walk out and take a limo taxi to your destination. It is so hassle free. There is WiFi in certain sections and good food and book stores to boot. The mall in the airport is like as big as any mall you can find in the city. I dont know how big the area is but I can tell you that it is atleast 10 times the size of our Mumbai airport, which I think should be the biggest airport in India today.

The basic issue in placing an airport in India is that people crib when they decide to set up the airport in the outskirts. The new Mumbai airport is in New Panvel, thats a good way off the Andheri's and Dadar's of Mumbai. I can understand why people crib. The traffic to Panvel is killing till you pass Vashi. Now the whole point is you build the airport in the outskirts but please make a good 4 lane or 6 lane road to the place too. That our government will not do. The approach road to the KLIA is like an F-1 track but much wider :)

The new Bangalore airport is coming up in Hebbal, which at that point of time was the outskirts, but now it is as much part of the city as it can be. The IT companies complained that it is a good 2-3 hour drive from the Electronics city to the Hebbal Airport. Definitely, if they have to take the same roads that they are taking now. When will our governments not take a short term perspective on things and make up their mind on a long term vision. The HAL airport (the current Bangalore airport) is smaller than the dysfunctional Air India/Indian Airlines office in Nariman point. So that should give you an idea, how bad the scene is.

In KLIA, people board the airline like half an hour before the take off as they have 30-35 vestibules that can feed the planes at one go. So all it needs is 10 minutes for the plane to get into the runway and take-off. In our case, the poor airline has to do the boarding and the take-off in the 15- 20 minutes alloted to it and invariably, it gets delayed. A visit at exactly 12 midnight to the Bangalore international departure side will give you an idea of the increasing traffic at this airport. There are something like 2o0 chairs which get filled and another 100 odd people standing in the lounge area.

If you make the flying more pleasurable, I am sure more number of people are gonna take up air travel over rail travel. If we dont make anything like the KLIA or the Changi in the next 5 years in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, I wonder what would happen to the air travellers...

A better Bihar for a better India

If there was one state which had got rotten in the last 10 years in India , it has been Bihar. Ok Kerala comes a close second in terms of Industrialization and opening up of the small economy. But it makes it up with the very high Human Development Index, which is comparable to many European countries and other developed countries. And it is exactly here that Bihar scores very poor. In fact there has been utter chaos of the management of the state.

There is this article by Prakash Jha in the Express today speaking of what he thinks has been happening in the state which was once the hub of education. (ya that goes a long long way back). Prakash Jha has been making some good movies on social causes, contesting elections unsuccessfully and his latest movie is something I am looking forward to this year. It is on the organized kidnapping market in Bihar.

I have a lot of friends from that state and I have to admit that most of them topped in different branches in REC. And there is enough examples of IAS officers from Bihar. So who is to blame? Laloo has been playing the caste card for long now. BJP was plain lucky to be the beneficiary this time because the people in that state has been fed up of the Laloo regime. An party which was in the opposition would have won this time. It doesn’t mean that BJP will not be corrupt. They will be, but not to the extent of what Laloo did, because they would like to go back to the masses after 5 years again.

Anyway, Bihar needed a break from Laloo. India needed a break from Laloo. Or for that matter it is high time India gave a break to the old and crumbling politicians in their parties. I was reading the newspaper here in Singapore, where the reporter has expressed surprise at the visiting Ex Prime Minister of Singapore finding young MPs in India. Well we are changing. How fast we do it will determine where we are in the race with China.

I have never been to Patna, but have heard enough stories of the place and other villages that it really gives you the jitters. Jamshedpur has been protected by what the Tatas have been doing there. Hence Jharkand to some extent has been shielded. There has been some really good movies which have shown the life and times of Bihar/UP. Most of them have been pretty low profile. One that comes to mind immediately (maybe because it is very recent) is Sehar. Was it eastern UP rather than Bihar? Well it is a beautiful movie with Arshad Warsi playing a subdued role to perfection.

Lets hope some changes will happen now in Bihar. Don’t expect anything dramatic.

~sujith

tuesdays with Morrie and Being Patient

A book I picked up from a shop that read "Less priced Books". Either their english is bad or they follow our less and lesslie slangs.

Another thing that I noticed over the last many many years is that, you need to be very patient to be mature and you need to be very mature to be patient. Well I think both are mutually inclusive. It is very difficult for us Indians to be patient, atleast in India.

One small experience that I had here just goes on to prove this. We were late for a meeting and driving out of the city. There was some rain which actually crippled traffic in the city and cars were moving at a very slow pace. All the roads were blocked. But when I say that they were blocked, they were neatly blocked. You could see 3 or 2 lines of cars in proper lines. There was space between cars, such that if this was India I am sure the ricks and smaller cars would have forced their way in. Here no one did.

But we had to rush as we were already late. So there is this lane for the Buses, which is not occupied. It was clear of any vehicles. Imagine you can see for the next 2 kms that there is a jam but the innermost lane (for the buses) are not occupied. So we get into it and zoom past the waiting buses. Well except for us and 1-2 vehicles, who I guess must also have been in some hurry were the only ones who used it. The rest of the vehicles, each and every one of them stayed clear of that particular lane.

I cant think of such a scenario in any of the Indian cities, especially in Bangalore. That is where your patience counts. Would you stand behind a 100 cars or take a quick left get into the bus lae and zoom past. Think about it, the day we learn to be patient, we will progress.

Twin Towers

I have been of awe of this building ever since I landed here. It is really huge and looks really sexy in the nite.

Too much of metal reflects the light and throws up a strange concoction.

I loved it.

A Room With a View

And what a view it is... So guess thats an easy clue to trace where I am now.

About 100 odd metres from my room I guess.

This city has got infra of the highest quality but i guess they realise the need for the expanding population/vehicles...etc

Hunted for some office space. Well got a digi cam and these are the initial pics from that.

rest later

~sujith

Where is the Vision?

Couple of days back, Govt of India finally opened its eyes and came up with a portal of its own. A much awaited one, given the fact that, in most of the developing countries it is very easy to get approvals online to start your own business etc and many other things. India has always been blamed of being covered from head to toe with red tape. Well rest assured, now
you can take your driving licence from any state online, companies can file returns online, you can contribute to Prime Minister's Fund and much much more. Yes you can also register your company and start business. This needs to be validated as the provision seems to bethere.

I checked it a little more in detail. There are maps which show almost all the demographic ratios and details. An interesting thing was that there are some state reports that are available online. There are four states for which there are some reports that are online. The obvious two should have been Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Well thats not the case. The list goes like this in alphabetical order - Goa, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Surprise it is that two of the states are the communist bastions where such things like adapting technology should be the least important programme of the government. Tamil Nadu has always been better off in terms of adapting technology and setting up infrastructure, be it the blooming educational institutions in that state or the industries setting up shop in the state. Goa is another state which is making progress at a rapid pace.They have quietly implemented changes like "Banning Plastic Bags", which lead to such a hue and cry even in Mumbai. They pulled it off quite successfully too.

I further probed and was surprised to find the "Vision 2020" document available online. I downloaded the document as I thought I will read it peacefully at home and see what the Govt has thought for us when we will be like 40 years old. There were seperate sections like Urban Infrastructure, Rural infrastructure, Telecom and Transport, which sounded interesting as these were the current issues in focus after the rains and stuff. Well we still live with our major issues like Poverty, Illiteracy and Unemployment. They are like the old politicians in parliament, they will take a while to get out of the system.

Ok now about the document Vision 2020. It is a document written in 2002, by the committee under the chairmanship of Dr. S P Gupta (He was/is a member of PLanning Commission). The Foreword is by K C Pant, the Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission. Its starts off like this "Every country needs a vision statement which stirs the imagination and motivates all segments of society to greater effort"...wow, should be interesting. It goes on to say that the committee after intensive research etc, has examined the issues that the country faces, giving projections for 2020 and all.

With this I thought let me check out the the 3 sections that I was talking about. Page number 58 took me to the Chapter 4 - Infrastructure. It started off with some statistics and then some general statements, which doesnt prove a point to anyone who is reading it. It moves to rural infra and then compares rural and urban living. A fifth standard comparison of these two parameters. I was expecting the Planning Commission to give some break-through ideas on how the infra problems would be solved,some new plans would be suggested, but nothing like that. There was a one and only alternative suggested, which goes like this "link clusters of ten villages together by a high speed circular highway, thereby bringing 100,000 or more people into a circular community that can be crossed within 30 minutes travel time, and promoting a balanced and well spread out development of urban services along the periphery of the ring road."

Telecom was even worse than Infra.It traces the history of how the telecom sector developed in India. Is this a document for the future or a circumsition of the past. Give me a break. There is a table thrown in to show the "Number Main Telephone Lines per 100 Inhabitants". Us rests on top followed by Germany, Japan...If the telecom sector was not thrown open to privatisation we would not have seen the kind of growth seen now. It is more affordable and easy for the mobiles to penetrate than waiting for the BSNL people to dig up the roads in laying cables. And with its set principles of generalised inferences the section on Telecom comes to an end in page number 64.

Next in line is Transport. The same statistics. The road transport is discussed and it makes a statement like this "No organised, viable and significant public transport system is available in major cities, except the four metro areas of Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Delhi." Thank you sir, it was an eye-opening statement. I feel ashamed to state the conclusions drawn in the document. It is like the fillers you sometimes write in your exam paper when you know like 2 points but have to somehow make 5 points out of it. Again there is a table with Future Trends in Transport. I dont have words to describe it. After the entire reading the only value add to me was in knowing the fact, if it is true is that "Already more people travel between Delhi and Mumbai by air than by rail." No numbers to prove it, will have to check it out. Not difficult these days. But I do not have the patience. All you need to do is find out the number of flights and trains between these sectors and then do some addition and multiplication.

Thats for later, but what do we do of our bureaucrats who cant think of any Vision for us, hapless Indians. they might bloody well think of how much to loot from the public pockets in the next 100 years, but not this. The only argument against this article could be that, maybe the actual vision of a country is not disclosed in the public domain. This is a loose argument as nobody gains anything in knowing our country's vision for 2020. I only have one thing to say after reading the Vision 2020 document - A paper writing contest in a B-school would have prepared a better Vision 2020 statement. I am serious.

~Sujith

And the whole time I was typing this article, I played just one song and repeated it. The title song fom Swades - "Yeh jo Desh hai tera". A R Rehman has got this unique ability to deliver patriotic numbers. The movie was one of the best I saw last year. But unfortunately, the Hindi movies I consider good are always a flop at the box-office.

This time a Fat One

A book which has been written by someone who has more than a say when it comes to International matters.

Frequently criticises Dubyaman and his likes. A big fat book it is. Lemme see how long I can go.

How Dubyaman got his name is a very interesting thing. It seems in his state "W" is pronounced as "Dubya" or something close to that. Hence George W Bush became, George Dubya Bush and later on Dubya man.

A busy week ahead.

Good to see Indian cricket look good, 100% effort in the field is a rare sight in Indian cricket. India has got 2 more good left handed batsmen - Raina and Gambhir. Both like to pull the ball and play aggresively, good running between the wickets and very very good fielders. Now where do we fit in Ganguly?

Chelsea lost. this should have been a seperate blog in itself, but then time doesnt permit. I am so glad. They are a good team but somehow, they seem arrogant, it is like the Australian cricket team. They are so good and win everything that you have to hate them. Arsenal and ManU might not finish on top but they should make Chelsea swet it out for the rest of the league.

But that team is a clas apart. Essien is a class act. He creates chances from nowhere. Wright Phillips runs and runs and runs. That young lad has stamina par his body. He dribles his way through any defence. Joe Cole is a talented footballer who has this knack of scoring goals. And I am not even talking of Lampard, Terry, Crespo and Drogba etc.

Whatever, Arsenal rocks.

Excerpts from FPS

FPS(Five Point Someone) has some cute descriptions of how girls think, how guys talk or dont talk and what guys generally think about how girls talk. I thought they were as close to the truth as it can get. Here are a few examples -

Neha said, "What's wrong?"
"Who said anything was wrong?"I said.
"It is written all over your face. Now are you going to tell me or what?"
That is the thing with girls. They are like half your size or something, but if they know you like them, they boss you around. Who the hell did she think she was?

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"Come here,"she said, tapping the seat next to her in the parlour.
"Why?"
"Just come here."
Like a trained pet, I got up from the seat opposite and sat next to her; pretty girls have this power to turn Mary, making lambs out of people.
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We went to Nirula's after the movie for a meal.
"So, what is Prof Veera like, tell me," Neha said, cutting the pizza we ordered into equal-sized pieces. Girls love organizing food on a table.
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"What are you doing?"Neha pulled back.
I tried to look innocent.
"Were you trying to kiss me on the lips?"
"No."
"Hari, you know I am not into that."
Then what the hell are you into? Funny private jokes?
"Because this is wrong. This spoils everything. Because it feels wrong. You are not a girl, you wont understand."
Yes, I wanted to say, and you are not a guy, so you will not understand.
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I watched Neha's face as she applied her lipstick with the same concentration as Alok had when solving quanti problems. Girls are beautiful, lets face it, and life is quite, quite worthless without them.
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I leaned forward to hug her.
"Ouch, careful,"she said, pushing me back on the bed,"I know what you pine for."
"What?"
"My body, not me,"she said, nose up in air.What is the difference? I thought. You just cannot understand girls sometimes.
"That is not true,"I said, just guessing that it would be the right response.
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Why is it hard to explain stuff to girls. Cant she just get on with it? Should I say something dumb that she wants to hear.
"Neha, I know I did all those things. but at one level, it wasnt me. It wasnt your Hari,"I said. Obviously, I made no sense. But that is the thing with girls. Give them confusing crap and they fall for it.
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"Hari?"
"What?"
"I missed you too." She broke into tears.I wish I could cry too. But her words made me too happy. I mentally hi-fived myself and tried to control my elation. Keep serious tone, I told myself."Oh Neha, dont cry,"I said, probably to make her cry a bit more. I cant tell you how good it feels when a girl cries because she missed you.
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FPS also has some decent coversations between guys, like this one between Ryan and Hari...
"So you guys serious?"
"Serious about what?"
"I dont know; like you love her and everything?"
"I dont know."I said.
That is how men talk about their relationships. Nobody knows anything - neither the questioner nor the answerer.
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If there is one thing men completely lack, it is the ability to communicate during tough moments.
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Though overall the book is just ok types, the engineering college funda is quite genuine. One of my friend thinks that it is not fair that a topper is trying to write about a life of some mediocre students (yup like us) in an engg college. Fyi, Chetan Bhagat is an IIT Delhi-IIM Ahmedabad combo and was last working as an I Banker in Honk Kong.

~Sujith

Another Book

5 Point Somenone by Chetan Bhagat was an Ok types book. I loved the part where Hari describes Neha Cherian (ya the heroine is a Mallu babe). The way gals think and the way guys think about it.

I was so impressed by it that I marked all the pages where the author talks about it. All that in the next blog. Happy holiday guys and gals.

A nite to remember

Well Diwali went off fine here in B'lore.

Went to this nice restaurant off Brigade Road, called Three Quarter Chinese, with Vikash and Vicky. Then went to Vikash's house, some fun over drinks. Well had to do something stupid as the guys forced me to. No nothing stupid like you think. Goa you can keep your wisecracks to yourself.

Well then it started off with "neele neele ambar par...", (I am not much into hard rock as these
guys are) slowly shifted to Vicky playing some nice classy hindi songs (never knew he could play pehla nasha), dooba dooba and stuff. Then Vikash had his own rendition of the Ronan Keating number. Vicky build the Wonder Wall and Vikash had to finish it off with a "Every rose has its thorn..."

Well have say that these guys have not changed one bit since college, Vicky was as funny as ever and Vikash as serious as ever, though he tried being funny. Well K they have already found a drummist, so you better lookout for another band :)

And then I got back home really late. Should say I had a nice diwali, a musical one.

Oh by the way, I went go-karting too. My time is not all that great but I guess I am enjoying it. Got beaten by all my friends and their wives, so better keep quiet about my speed. All I can say is I am improving, moreover I believe in safe driving :)