{"id":865,"date":"2005-01-02T11:58:52","date_gmt":"2005-01-02T16:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com?p=865"},"modified":"2005-01-14T00:48:29","modified_gmt":"2005-01-14T05:48:29","slug":"jetting_to_bang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/2005\/01\/02\/jetting_to_bang\/","title":{"rendered":"Jetting to Bangalore"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jet Airways<\/A>, the leading private airline in India, is far more luxurious than American ones: brand-new Airbus jets, hot face towels, nimbu pani<\/A> and watermelon juice, coffee candies, sumptuous red and orange linen napkins bound in velvet rope, a choice of North or South Indian meals (ever had hot idli sambar and utappam on an airplane?), and a never-ending stream of tea and coffee. And all this on short-haul domestic routes rather the overseas ones served by Singapore and Virgin.<\/P>\n

The Indian government will now allow<\/A> Jet and Air Sahara to fly international routes, although it continues to shelter the lucrative Middle Eastern routes from competition. The airlines are presumably on their own for buying landing slots.<\/P>\n

\"\"Indian airports are also in dire need of investment. On a recent trip, I could get wireless Internet access<\/A> at the Delhi and Bangalore airports. However, they otherwise still resemble small regional airports in the U.S.: open-air gates, buses instead of jetways and a vanishingly small distance from gate to parking lot. They’re like the old terminal at San Jose before the tech bubble.<\/P>\n

\"\"<\/P>\n

But with an astonishing 20% annual growth in air traffic, India just signed off on a plan<\/A> to upgrade 80 airports<\/A> throughout the country, including brand-new airports for Bangalore and Hyderabad. They’re partying like it’s 1999.<\/P>\n

And in the tech-heavy cities, it pretty much is. Driving through Bangalore, I saw buildings that looked exactly like U.S. tech campuses, though smaller. Intel, Dell, Oracle, Accenture and Macromedia buildings abound; on one corner, with a shock of recognition, I came face-to-face with a company<\/A> started by a friend. I couldn’t help but feel late to the party. With the number of South Indian programmers already working at Oracle, why not hire ’em straight from the motherland \ud83d\ude42<\/P>\n

At $400 per developer per month, even small companies are now setting up operations in Bangalore. One of my relatives with a hardware business has a modest office in Bangalore which processes inbound orders, has engineers correct the circuit designs, and FTP’s<\/A> them back to California within 15 minutes.<\/P>\n

\"\"I found that Bangalore parallels Silicon Valley in many ways. It has a temperate climate, few mosquitoes, calm drivers, low crime, and a cluster of engineering schools churning out 40,000 grads a year. Just as the Berkeley \/ Stanford \/ San Jose State triad overpowered MIT and Route 128, Bangalore beat out the other geek culture centers of Chennai, Cochin and Hyderabad. I had the best Internet access in Bangalore, a reasonably fast 512 kbps DSL line at home. And strong job growth has created high employee turnover of around 20% a year.<\/P>\n

Unfortunately, Bangalore’s social life, too, is lifted from the Valley’s ‘burbs. We swung by a popular club called Spinn<\/A>, albeit on a Monday night. It was about to close, and by midnight the rest of MG Road was deserted. Early in the week, the best option was to hang out at the slick new Forum mall, which felt exactly like a midsized Valley Fair<\/A> during an Oracle convention \ud83d\ude42 From the social standpoint, Pune, a tech center three hours from Bombay, seems much more enticing.<\/P>\n

Outside these islands of quality<\/A>, here’s the everyday Bangalore:<\/P>\n

\"\" \"\" \"\" <\/P>\n

And more MG and Brigade Roads:<\/P>\n

\"\" \"\" \"\" \"\" <\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jet Airways, the leading private airline in India, is far more luxurious than American ones: brand-new Airbus jets, hot face towels, nimbu pani and watermelon juice, coffee candies, sumptuous red and orange linen napkins bound in velvet rope, a choice … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20,15,9,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}