Into Bangalore

It's been a few days since Ive written, but thanks to Jeff, you all haven't been out of the loop. The last few days have found us becoming more and more accustomed to the lifestyle here - habitual and random power outages, friendly yet unhurried service, and the craziness of the traffic, which, by its very nature, seems to condemn us to a swift head-on demise each time we get into a car or autorickhsaw; yet now we seem unsurprised when we emerge at our destination unscathed, with all our limbs, and most importantly, breathing.

Work has brought us to Bangalore, the IT hub of India. We were greeted by a glistening and shiny new airport worthy of a spread in architecture digest, which, we thought, was a harbinger for what to expect for the rest of Bangalore. It wasn't completly accurate, but wasn't completely wrong either. In Bangalore, the tree lined beautiful tech campuses of Fortune 500 companies like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc sit unceremoniously ajoint to a congested road filled with the sites and sounds we've already discovered across India - cows blocking the road (today we even saw a camel doing the same), suffocating exhaust fumes from the buses, and the general mayhem that is normally present and which Ive already described. Next to these campuses still lie the tin roofed shack, the dilapidated building, or the isolated farm house - all reminders that the development praised here in India is not yet complete nor equally affecting everyone.