Bangalore Sweatbox

Footpaths: Veritable minefields of Bangalore

2009-01-25T12:34:00.000-08:00

Footpaths: Veritable minefields of Bangalore

By Express News Service
25 Jan 2009 08:22:00 AM IST

BANGALORE: BBMP Commissioner S Subramanya hit the bull's eye two months ago when remarked that "Only god can save the city's pedestrians." Saturday morning provided a bitter testimony to this gruesome fact. A bit too bitter, perhaps. The badly-maintained roads and broken pavements can send a chill down anyone's spine even without such extreme reminders.

Pedestrians are forced to enter the death zones where even motorists struggle to find space, as the space where they would have rather walked -- the footpath -- is almost non-existent in the city. And if they do exist, they end abruptly or are cluttered with everything except the pedestrian. During peak hours, the balancing act between road and sidewalk, can prove to be life-threatening.

While delivering a talk at Bangalore International Centre recently on urban transport planning, urban planning expert Madhav Badami pulled up the government for spending crores of rupees on the Metro Rail but not expending "a single penny" to create space for cyclists and pedestrians. He had also highlighted the fact that pedestrians did not contribute to congestion on roads nor did they benefit from motorisation "but were hugely affected adversely by both the factors."

The city's infrastructure development has been focused on the development of roads for motor vehicles but not for the pedestrians. Having waken up to this fact, the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has constructed pedestrian subways and has proposed similar subways across the city. Apart from the pedestrian subways, the BBMP has also proposed to construct skywalks and bicycle paths on major roads, BBMP sources said. Zone-wise programmes to evacuate encroachments on footpaths and clearing of debris is in progress. The old stone slabs used for pavements are being given granite-finishing and works of renovating footpaths are under way, added sources. A study titled "Traffic and Transportation Policies and Strategies in Urban Areas in India" drives home the point that Bangalore is "pedestrian-unfriendly."

According to M N Sreehari, chairman, Traffic Engineers and Safety Trainers, Bangalore, ranks the garden city twelfth among the 30 surveyed cities on the "walkability" index.

Times of India, 9 Jan 09: Bangalore a 'heat island'

2009-01-09T09:55:00.000-08:00

Bangalore has become heat island
9 Jan 2009, 0204 hrs IST, Jayashree Nandi, TNN

Bangalore : Bangalore is witnessing an alarming depletion of wetland areas and vegetation cover, according to a recent study by the Centre for Ecological Sciences of the Indian Institute of Science. It shows an increase of 1 to 1.5 degree in temperature in certain pockets of Bangalore that have seen intense urbanization.

According to lead researcher T V Ramachandra, there is almost an increase of 466% of building area or paved surface in the past three years and that is not allowing water to percolate through the soil. Of 200 tanks present in 1985, only 17 survive today, which means that the wetland area has decreased alarmingly. "The vegetation and amount of water bodies in a city have a direct relationship with local temperature. Bangalore is an urban heat island. The increase in emissions from transport, faulty architecture, lack of vegetation and wetlands are leading to these temperature changes," he said.

However, he did not attribute the chilly mornings this winter to the same phenomenon. "I checked the records and the winter temperature is almost the same, swinging around 12 degrees. But other issues like humidity and sudden heat waves could be a reflection of the increasing temperature or global warming," he added.

The report also points out that there has been an increase in flooding. Reclamation of lakes for various developmental activities has resulted in the loss of inter-connectivity in Bangalore district, leading to higher instances of floods even during normal rainfall.

LAKE LOSS

The decline in the number of water bodies in Bangalore is mainly due to unbridled and intense urbanization. Many lakes were encroached for illegal buildings (54%). Field surveys (during July-August 2007) show that nearly 66% of lakes are sewage fed, 14% surrounded by slums and 72% showed loss of catchment area. Lake catchments were used as dumping yards for either municipal solid waste or building debris.

Tech employee dies in pie-eating contest

2008-11-20T10:41:00.000-08:00

In one of the idiotic team-building exercises run by Western companies to foster fun and solidarity among their workers, Nokia-Siemens ran a pie-eating contest in their office in Guragon, leading to the choking death of a 22-year-old employee.

Police investigate Nokia contest death

By Mahesh Arora

A 22-year old techie, Saurab Sabharwal, employed with Nokia-Siemens Networks in Gurgaon died mysteriously while participating in a pastry-eating competition in the cafeteria of the office premises on November 19. The doctors at the Max Hospital where he was brought dead said that the pastry chocked his windpipe rendering him breathless.

The incident took place at about 1.00 in the afternoon when a number of employees of the company were participating in a pastry-eating competition in the cafeteria. Saurab, who worked as a solution engineer with the company since June this year, was also eating pastry quickly to out-compete others. All of a sudden he rushed towards the bathroom area and never came back. Coincidentally, one of the colleagues happened to visit the bathroom where he spotted Saurab lying on the floor. Saurab was rushed to Max Hospital in Sushant Lok at about 2.00 in the afternoon where the doctors tried to revive him, but to no avail.

RK Sabharwal charged the company officials for negligence saying that they should have arranged for medical experts during the pastry-eating competition which otherwise should not have been organized at all. He said that no one bothered to take care of his son whose windpipe had got chocked during the event. Such competition should not be held at all, he contended. The distraught father submitted a written compliant with the police officials demanding investigation into the case. Dr. S Sharma, the medical advisor at Max Hospital, also said that such events of pastry-eating competitions should be avoided in general.

However, the police officials said that the action against the officials of Nokia-Siemens would be decided only after the receipt of the post-mortem report of Saurab’s body. Saurab lived in Patparganj in New Delhi and his father RK Sabharwal worked with a public sector bank Punjab National Bank in Delhi. Nokia-Siemens Networks has its corporate office in Cybergreens, DLF Cybercity but has one subsidiary in Udyog Vihar where Saurab was employed as solution engineer.

The company officials who were present at Max Hospital refused to comment on the incident.

Bangalore techies support Obama

2008-11-18T09:53:00.000-08:00

A news story says President-Elect Barack Obama has a posse in Bangalore, where tech industry workers recognize his pro-globalization stance.

Another bus set afire after an accident

2008-01-26T11:33:00.000-08:00

It seems to happen all the time in Bangalore: A bus accidentally kills or injures a passer-by, and an angry mob materializes and sets the bus on fire.

Contrast this with recent incidents in San Francisco:

17 Jan 08: Streetcar kills man

30 Dec 07: Streetcar kills man

27 Dec 07: Bus kills student

In none of these cases did an angry mob materialize nor were transit vehicles attacked. When I was in Bangalore last year I asked a couple of people about this phenomenon, and of the riots that take place from time to time. He replied that there were simply a lot of dissatisfied poor people who are easily stirred up by troublemakers and provocateurs. I don't have much trouble understanding about the angry poor people, and I can even see the troublemakers -- thugs associated, perhaps, with a local politician, institution or crime-lord, people for whom literal rabble-rousing is part of their job description. Even in the US we have politicians and community figures in every city who can get a gang of people to a public hearing or demonstration without much trouble. But one thing they don't do is attack transit vehicles.

Outsourcing users to Bangalore

2007-12-30T11:54:00.001-08:00

An American startup is paying people in India to sign up for its service so it can show it has 1000s of users.

Culture collision

2007-12-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

I loved all the different cultural elements in the picture contained in this post -- Xmas trees, a man in a Santa hat, what look like piñatas -- all at a "bangle store" in Bangalore.

Call center workers' health suffers

2007-12-26T10:32:00.000-08:00

India's outsourcing industry faces growing health problems

Associated Press, 26 Dec 2007

NEW DELHI - The job came with a good salary, and good perks.

But, 26-year-old Vaibhav Vats will tell you, it was doing him no good. His weight had grown to 265 pounds and he was missing out on social life as he worked long overnight hours at a call center. Eventually, he quit.

"You are making nice money. But the tradeoff is also big," said Vats, who spent nearly two years at IBM Corp.'s call center arm in India, answering customer calls from the United States.

Call centers and other outsourced businesses such as software writing, medical transcription and back-office work employ more than 1.6 million young men and women in India, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who make much more than their contemporaries in most other professions.

They are, however, facing sleep disorders, heart disease, depression and family discord, according to doctors and several industry surveys.

Experts warn the brewing crisis could undermine the success of India's hugely profitable outsourcing industry that earns billions in dollars annually and has shaped much of the country's transformation into an emerging economic power.

Heart disease, strokes and diabetes cost India an estimated $9 billion in lost productivity in 2005. But the losses could grow to a staggering $200 billion over the next 10 years if corrective action is not taken quickly, said a study by New Delhi-based Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.

The outsourcing
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industry would be hardest hit, it warned.

Reliable estimates on the number of people affected are hard to come by, but government officials and experts agree that it is a growing problem. Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss wants to enforce a special health policy for employees in the information technology industry.

"After working, they party for the rest of the time ... (They) have bad diet, excessive smoking and drinking," he said at a public meeting last month. "We don't want these young people to burn out."

The minister's comments have since infuriated the technology sector, which says it has been unfairly singled out for problems that also exist in other professions.

The outsourcing industry has come under fire because the sedentary lifestyle of its employees combined with often stressful working conditions makes them more vulnerable to heart disease, digestive problems and weight gain than others. Some complain of psychological distress.

Most call center jobs involve responding to phone calls through the night from customers in the United States and Europe - some of whom can be angry and rude. It is monotonous and there is little meaningful personal interaction among co-workers. That can also be true of other jobs such as software writing and back-office work.

"There are times when the stress is so overwhelming that they fail to cope with it. Then they come to us," said Archana Bisht who set up a counseling company, 1to1help.net, in Bangalore six years ago.

Her clientele has since grown to 25 companies - seven of them were added in the past two months - including such names as Intel Corp., IBM Corp., Hewlett Packard Co. and Mindtree Consulting Ltd.

Each day, about 60 to 70 employees at these companies seek counseling from 1to1help.net. The complaints are many, but marital incompatibility and relationship issues top the list, Bisht said, often because the long, odd working hours means couples don't have much time together.

More women than men ask for help, she said. The outsourcing boom has created new employment opportunities for Indian women, but there has been little change in social expectations. Adding workplace demands to responsibilities at home, which often includes taking care of in-laws, leaves women workers with multiple stresses, Bisht said.

Loneliness can also take a toll.

"There is no social life," said Vats, who worked at night and either slept or watched television during the day. "You are not meeting new people."

The industry is getting sensitive to these problems.

The National Association of Software Services Companies, the main trade body of the outsourcing industry, said many of its member firms are already providing facilities like advice on health, gyms and money for regular checkups.

Companies like Infosys Technologies Ltd. have set up 24-hour helplines for counseling by psychologists, while others have tied up with companies like 1to1help.net. Some like HCL Technologies Ltd. have built daycare centers for children and routinely sponsor group outings by their employees.

But the industry insists it would do nothing to impose any lifestyle on its employees.

"We do not think it is for companies or for the government to interfere in the personal life of adult Indians," NASSCOM said in a statement.

Also, there is little it can do to change the nighttime work hours of many outsourcing jobs.

"The odd hours can play havoc with your health," said Vats. "I never got good sleep because everyone was up and getting ready to go to work when I got home ... Your diet goes for a toss. You get acidity, develop gastric problems."

Vats' weight has dropped to 214 pounds since leaving IBM Daksh two years ago. He's still overweight for his 5 feet 9 inch frame, but is much happier now working with a law firm for a much lower salary.

A recent survey by Dataquest magazine and technology consulting company IDC showed sleep disorders topped health complaints among outsourcing industry workers.

About 32 percent of respondents complained of sleep disorders; 25 percent had digestive troubles; and 20 percent reported eyesight problems, said the survey, which covered 1,749 employees at 19 outsourcing companies.

Yet, they would not talk about it openly. Several call center employees contacted by the Associated Press admitted to having many of these ailments, but they refused to be named or identify their employer.

Sleep and digestive disorders, doctors say, can grow into bigger problems: hypertension, diabetes and heart diseases.

Doctors say the rise in these diseases, alongside growing urbanization and fast-paced economic growth, is not surprising.

But India's case is alarming because of the sheer number of people affected and the factors that make them vulnerable to these diseases, said Ravi Kasliwal, a cardiologist at New Delhi's Indraprastha Apollo Hospital. These include India's fat-rich diet, genetic factors make them highly vulnerable to diabetes, and abdominal obesity that gives rise to insulin resistance and heart disease.

"To top it all, there is lack of awareness," Kasliwal said. "One out of 10 persons aged 35 years or more in this country is prone to heart attack."

Heart disease is projected to account for 35 percent of deaths among India's working age population between 2000 and 2030, Kasliwal said, citing a World Health Organization study. That number is about 12 percent for the United States, 22 percent for China and 25 percent for Russia.

"This is a very serious issue for this country," Kasliwal said. "But nobody wants to talk about it."

Bangalore said to solve chronic flooding

2007-12-25T09:27:00.000-08:00

Flooding after rains (see the article from September, for example) has been a chronic problem in Bangalore for years. If they have really fixed it, it will be quite an achievement.

The Hindu, 24 Dec 2007

No flooding in Bangalore anymore: official

Staff Reporter

BANGALORE: It is likely that the city will not face any major instances of flooding during the next spell of rains, said S. Subramanya, Commissioner, Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), here on Saturday.

Work was on at the 11 vulnerable spots in the city to prevent flooding in the event of rain, he said at an interaction programme organised by the Bangalore Reporters' Guild. The Central Silk Board area, Puttenahalli, Arakere, Nayandanahalli, Katriguppe, Illyas Nagar, Bhadrappa Layout, S.T. Bed Layout, Kamakhya Layout, Hennur, Ejipura and Bandappa Colony were the vulnerable spots, he said.

On providing infrastructure to new areas under the BBMP, Dr. Subramanya said that all main roads in these areas would be asphalted.

The complete black-top asphalting work would cost the BBMP about Rs. 1,800 crore.

On BBMP's finances, he said the "basket of funds" with it had not dried up and loans would be taken only if it was necessary. "We have a line of credit of up to Rs. 200 crore ready," Dr. Subramanya said.

Stating that road-widening was necessary for better traffic management, he said that Bellary Road, Race Course Road, Hosur-Lashkar Road and Jayamahal Road would be widened this year.

Partial work on Palace Road, Seshadri Road and Kasturba Road would be taken up, he added.

Avoid mad teen driving, say cops

2007-12-20T12:02:00.001-08:00

Bangalore: Stay away from Outskirts this Christmas, Alert Cops

Soumya Menon/Newindpress

Bangalore, Dec 20: Stay away from hotels or resorts in the outskirts of the city, especially during Christmas and New Year's eve, warn the police, keeping in mind the rise in number of accidents during nights.

Police officials claim that at least 70 per cent of accidents at night involve teenagers, who head to the outskirts after a party at break-neck speeds.

"College students, IT professionals, BPO and call centre employees, who usually go for long drives in the night towards outskirts, should avoid doing so," said a senior police official from Bangalore Rural.

During the Christmas season, youth will be on a party spree and have a tendency to head out, though in groups. "We have seen children meeting with accidents," the officer said.

Apart from accidents, they can be mugged, and even attacked by miscreants. Take for instance, the National Law School (NLS) student who was stabbed to death in Gnanabharati after he got into a brawl with a gang of six unknown men.

"Most of the students are from reputed engineering and medical colleges. About 50 cars are seen at coffee shops in Ramanagaram and Channapatna on weekends," said a police official from Ramanagaram.

He also said that 2007 witnessed the maximum number of accidents involving youth, with over five accidents being reported every two months. Most of them drive to the outskirts after midnight and maximum accidents take place between 1 am and 4 am, said the officer.

"The usual speed limit on those highways is about 75 km/hr, but youngsters drive at 120 km/hr. Most of them ram into electric poles and road medians," said he added.

The latest accident occurred on December 4 this year, when a Srilankan national Gayana died on the spot after the Maruti Swift she and her friends were travelling in rammed into a road median at 1 am in Channapatna.

Dos & don'ts

Avoid eating at dhabas and restaurants on the outskirts, especially Nelamangala, Devanahalli, Ramanagaram and Channapatna at late night

Avoid going for long drives and halting at coffee shops on the outskirts

Move in groups and carry self defence items

Inform elders when venturing outskirts and do not resort to drunken driving.

Major accidents in 2007

In March 2007, two teenagers were killed, when their car rammed into an electric pole in Ramanagaram.

In April 2007, a Skoda car rams into electric pole at 3.15 am, two killed, three injured near Channapatna.

In May 2007, two teenagers were killed, while three others injured, after their car rammed into a stationary lorry in Chikkajala.

In June 2007, a software engineer died on the spot after his Getz car rammed into a police barricade in Channapatna at 2.30 am.

In July, 2007, four youths, including two call girls were killed on the spot after their Verna car rammed into an electric pole in Ramanagaram

In November 2007, a NLS student was stabbed to death in Gnanabharati by unknown people.

Accident cases reported

500 in 2004, 452 in 2005 1,324 in 2006.

Alert 'former commando' might have saved 5 lives!!!1!

2007-12-15T10:12:00.000-08:00

I will reprint this charming tale as is, from this forum page on Assam.net. The only change I have made to the text was to insert a few spaces.

Friends,

I did averted a major tragedy today at Bangalore, at 1300 hrs on 15 Dec 2007. This saved 5 lives from the probable hands of some gang to rob in motive of finally being killed at unknown destination.

At 1230 hrs today, I was driving my scooter at Old Madras Road,Bangalore. I noticed few passengers having argument with a Toyota Qualis driver and the driver is talking over his mobile phone. While I did approached the passengers supposed to be well to do with big bags,one young man came and asked me the distance from that place to the Bangalore Airport. There was 2 ladies, two young man and an old man. Later 2 were doctors- as told. On his question I had doubt. I could hear the driver saying "pay for 40 km. ". (The actual distance is 5 km) Then I did asked the passengers who were looking like coming from some other place by air and being Hindi speaking people. I did introduced about me and then they told me as doctors from Delhi and just hired this Toyota Qualis bearing Regn No. KA05-C 5924.

They came to Bangalore for sight seeing and hired this vehicle for 3 days. One of their friend did arranged this. So they boarded in this from airport at 1030 hrs and till 1230 hrs they were driving around airport and Indiranagar area through narrow lanes. They was to go to Majestic area to a Jain Temple for lunch and prayer. All was hungry. Airport to Majestic area is 14 km. Already the driver drove them 40 km. With doubt not reaching destination for 2 hours, they was arguing with the driver. At the God's grace, same time I was there and got the details. Since all the people are Hindi speaking, being from the north India, the driver had diferent motive. He was reluctant to listen me and was demanding more advance money. His bad luck struck. he never knew a real Comando standing in front of him and I am well versed with police!

Meanwhile few days ago, a lone women from Delhi landed at Bangalore airport and subsequently drove to diferent places and was being raped by lot many for 3-4 days.
My alert mind, being an Citizen and former military Commando, I smell some foul. These family wanted to go in and around famous Shravanabelgola, which is 145 km from Bangalore. And insted of driving via main Airport Rd,driving via Old Madras road made me to be more conscious. I immediately felt that these people might be taken for ransom and finally be killed away from city. Since the driver was also too busy to mobile talks with someone. he was least bothered to answer me in local language. Immediately I rushed up to the very close Indiranagar Police station and met the duty Sub Inspector. He is a dynamic young officer and responded me immediately. He too did agreed at my narrations and questioned the driver. The driver failed to reply lot. He told that his driving licence is in the vehicle (Wanted to run away), then the police SI nabbed his mobile and sent one constable to the vehicle. The document were not there and no DL that the driver had to show his identity or authority to drive. Immediately he was charged by the officer and we was asked to leave by arrranging some auto to them for resting and lunch at Kamath Yatrinivas, near Majestic.

The cab driver menace is alarming and growing day by day. They generally now a days target airport passengers who are outsiders. They take for a god ride in the name of avoiding bad traffic and convince the passengers and drive elsewhere while the passenger fatigued with hunger and strain. then they will mix up tranquilizers with fod or drinks and either rob or kill. Simple motive.

It was lucky that I had an appointment with a person at the same place. I did missed the apppointment as time was over with the incident. But I am happy being a Bangalorean and former Air force commando to utilize my third mind to save the life of 5 innocent civilians who had come all the way from Delhi to visit lovely Bangalore. They , otherwise would have lost all in someones land including lives!!

I feel little alet mind by all will help to prevent such happenings.
I would love to make such example public through your media, so that people wil come up and help Police.

Dr. Bikash Kumar Das
Bangalore

Five killed in building collapse

2007-12-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

The Hindu, 12 December 2007

Five killed, 18 injured as building collapses

Bangalore, (PTI): Five persons were killed and 18 injured when an old building at Nehrupura in Bharathi Nagar area in the city collapsed Tuesday night, police said.

The collapse was triggered after a large number of people gathered at a flat in the second floor of the building for a function, DCP (East), B K Singh, told PTI.

The building belonged to the city corporation, he said.

The injured have been hospitalised.

Balcony collapses, killing seven

2007-12-12T09:39:00.001-08:00

NNTV, Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Bangalore buildings crying for attention

by Pavitra Jayaraman

A happy occasion turned into a tragedy in Bangalore. A balcony overcrowded with people collapsed and left seven people dead.

The Bangalore city corporation says the contractor had illegally let the building out on rent without clearance from the corporation.

Thirteen-year old Ayesha is in shock and is bruised all over, she shudders as she thinks of Tuesday evening when she was leaning over the balcony watching a neighbour's "haldi ceremony" when the balcony on which she was standing suddenly gave way.

It took just a few minutes for the mood to change from happy wedding celebrations to utter chaos when a balcony in the building crashed and killed seven people.

Residents of the building are still in panic about the state of the building and blame the BBMP for not taking any responsibility. Meanwhile at least 20 people still lay injured in various hospitals.

The state governor visited and announced a compensation for the injured and the family of the dead.

"I am told that the building has not been cleared for occupation. We have to see whether they were authorised occupants or not. When you have a function with 40 persons leaning on the balcony, it cannot hold," said BBMP Commissioner.

While the contractor of the building in question will be interrogated, other BBMP will come under immediate scrutiny.

Jaquelin stands nervously outside her house to try and retrieve some money from inside, so she can pay the hospital bills of her injured sister. But the building is still screaming danger and no authority is willing to show her a safe way out.

"They are asking me to go upstairs and get the money myself, how is it possible? Ask them to do it, I will tell them where it is," said Jaquelin.

This is the fourth building that has collapsed in the city this year. The first one occurred when a portion of a two storied building collapsed and took the life of a two-year-old.

The second claimed two lives while the most recent one in November took two lives as well. Events that are a clear indication that while concrete Bangalore grows the existing buildings are crying for attention.

Bad commutes lead to telecommuting

2007-12-03T11:21:00.001-08:00

Bangalore techies get paid to stay at home

Deepa Balakrishnan / CNN-IBN

Published on Sat, Dec 01, 2007 at 00:56 in Nation section

BANGALORE: Wedged between the wardrobe and the family photos, is Satish Sundar's workstation. This 40-year-old became a medical language specialist at one of the country's oldest BPOs two years ago.

But Sundar soon realised that he was fatigued every day -- not by the work, but by the traveling. So last year, he joined 398 other people in his company to become a smart techie, and work from the comfort of his home.

"The traffic going down to office used to be too congested, especially during the monsoon. Then it takes some time for you to unwind also. You start getting tense and so it may, somewhere down the line affect your work," says Sundar.

The four hours Sundar spent on Bangalore's roads are now spent in watching his daughters learn to dance.

Many techies like him are now treating work as a takeaway, realising that outsourced work can be outsourced to home too, sometimes even in remote towns.

Vice-President Human Resources, Spheris, Surya V Ciryam says, "There's an increasing trend among men. It used to be around one to two per cent and has now gone up to around 30 per cent in the last year and we are seeing more requests from men today, than women."

Talent Engagement Vice-President, Wipro, Joseph John says, "It's a pain for employees who are traveling more than one hour to work and two hours to reach home. It's definitely an issue."

Employers save costs too, by reusing the same seats. Companies like Infosys have also opened a city branch to reduce time spent commuting, to ensure that employees don't quit because of traffic trauma.

Bangalore's made the world flat and now it's redefined distance. Thanks to traffic, distance is now measured not in terms of kilometres but the time taken, so it's better to just get off that office cab and stay at home.

Monsoon continues

2007-09-14T17:53:00.000-07:00

Times of India, 15 September 2007

Rain spells trouble for Bangalore

BANGALORE: "More spells of rain, and we are done. We fear the worst as lakes are swelling and the city's drains can take no more." That was BBMP commissioner S Subramanya's exasperated cry on Friday evening as flooded Bangalore convulsed in torrential rain.

The BBMP boss's statement reflected the harried citizens' plight. Unrelenting rain for the past three days has unleashed deluge and devastation, bringing the famed IT city to its knees. On the action front, over 5,500 BBMP men have been standing guard at the worst-hit and vulnerable spots. But senior BBMP officials are sure they're waging a losing battle: "A brimming Madivala Lake, and the weak stormwater drains in Nayandahalli and Bhadrappa Layout can do us in."

The Central Silk Board (CSB) Junction, from where Hosur Road takes on the hues of IT corridor, was in sheets of water. Office-goers were stuck in this mess for at least four hours. Vinita S, a software professional who started from home at 7 am, was still negotiating her way at the CSB Junction even at 12 noon.

Cars, buses, bikes -- you name them -- and they were all inching through an inundated Hosur Road, while a breached Madivala Lake arrested traffic in the entire grid. Traffic came to a standstill, and the pile-up continued even as the BBMP men tried draining out water with 30 pumpsets.

The nonstop rain on Thursday night brought alive the nightmare of 2005 floods. Water from the swelling lakes, breached drains and valleys in Bommanhalli, Puttenahalli, Sarakki and Madivala invaded homes. At least six wall-collapse incidents were reported, 35 trees fell on houses and roads in Vyalikaval, Basaveshwaranagar, Bhadrappa Layout and Jayanagar. All this led to hours of gridlock.

For those residing in Bhadrappa Layout, Nayandahalli, Jayanagar, BTM Layout, HSR Layout Sectors VI and VII, Marutinagar, it was a night-long ordeal to empty out the water gushing into their homes. Overflowing drains in Vrishbhavati Valley brought sewage into nearby homes, while apartments complained of waterlogging in the basements.

Monsoon rains continue in mid-September

2007-09-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

Deccan Herald, 15 Sep 2007

Bangalore city in deep water

DH News Service,Bangalore:

It's pouring woes in Bangalore. Three days of heavy downpour has thrown normal life completely out of gear, marooning hundreds of houses, damaging several structures and bringing traffic to a grinding halt. The rains have claimed two more lives -- one in Nayandanahalli and another in HSR Layout, taking the death toll during the last 48 hours to four.

No end to misery

There seems to be no end to the City's misery. The Met Department has warned of heavy to very heavy rains in the next 24 hours. The City received 200 mm of rain in the last 36 hours, the highest during this season.

Incessant rains on Friday also played a spoilsport for Ganesha festival and markets in the City wore a deserted look.

A 25-year-old man, Shastri, was electrocuted in HSR Layout. Shastri, a car driver, was checking the electric wiring in his house after a disruption in the power supply at 9 pm on Thursday when tragedy struck.

In another incident, an unidentified woman was washed way in a drainage of Nayandanahalli on Friday morning. Hundreds of houses in over 166 low-lying areas are flooded with water.

The worst affected areas are in the southern part of the City–Madivala, Iliyasnagar, J P Nagar 15th Main, Hosur Road, Koramangala –where water overflowed from 7 lakes -- Arakere, Begur, Puttenahalli, Lalbagh, Madivala, Hulimavu and Sarakki.

The overflowing water from the lakes brought traffic to a standstill on the busy Hosur Road -- from the Central Silk Board junction till Bommanahalli. With the water level on the road rising, people began moving about in coracles.
Many motorists abandoned their two-wheelers and four-wheelers on the footpath and walked home on foot.

The scene on Hosur Road was similar to what had happened in October 2005 when heavy rains pounded the city.

BBMP missing

Yet, the BBMP remained a mute spectator.

"It is not safe to stop overflowing water from these lakes. If we stop it by constructing bunds, they may breach which could be more dangerous. It is safe as long as excess water flows out of the lakes," BBMP Commissioner S Subramanya said.

Several low-lying areas along the Mysore Road too were flooded. Padarayanapura, Kamakshipalya, K P Agrahara, Gowdanapalya, Pantarapalya, Muneshwara Block and several others took the brunt of the rain havoc. Traffic on Mysore Road, from K R Market till Jnanabharati junction, crawled at a snail's pace through the day.

Water-logging was a common scene on almost all roads across the city.

Besides claiming two lives, four houses collapsed in Prashanthnagar, Saneguravanahalli, Shakambarinagar and Nayandanahalli in the rains. As many as 32 trees and several power poles were uprooted.

However, the commissioner defended the BBMP, saying that the situation goes out of control whenever rainfall exceeds 80 mm. "I am not saying that we cannot do anything. We are taking all necessary steps to mitigate the woes and prevent further damage," he stated.

He also denied that two people died due to the rains. "Deaths were not due to rains. Reasons may be different," he said.

Meanwhile, Health Minister R Ashok, who is also in-charge of Bangalore, said 60 teams with 50 personnel each have been constituted for relief operations in the rain-affected areas.

HANDS-OFF LEADERS

Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy and Bangalore Urban district in-charge Minister R Ashok both chose to monitor rain relief operations from the comfort of their offices rather than visit the affected areas.

Mr Kumaraswamy, who also holds the Bangalore City Development portfolio, held a review meeting at "Krishna" and issued instructions to officials. He wanted the BBMP Commissioner to be available at his office 24/7. Mr Ashok visited the BBMP control room.

The City MLAs too chose to stay indoors rather than go out and meet the people and listen to their grievances.

Bangalore a 'miracle'

2007-08-13T18:29:00.000-07:00

The Guardian (U.K.), 14 August 2007

The new India: Bangalore
The making of a miracle
In 1947 it was a provincial outpost. Today it's the most globalised city in India. Ian Jack reports from the boom town of Bangalore.
One early morning in Bangalore -- at about six, before the traffic thickened and made the timing of any cross-town journey the subject of doubting speculation - an enterprising young man called Arun Pai took me in his car to the edge of the Karnataka Golf Association course, where he asked his driver to stop. On one side, greens and bunkers. On the other, big new buildings coated in glass and occupied by IBM, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs. "I always take my foreign clients here," Pai said, "and ask them to tell me which famous author stood almost in the same position."

Many people have no difficulty. The answer is Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat, and this is the setting of his book's first sentence, when Friedman is about to swing from the first tee and his partner tells him: "Aim at either Microsoft or IBM." As a first sentence it hardly ranks with "The past is a foreign country ...", but Friedman's book, the world's most popular gospel of globalisation, has sold 3m copies. It takes its several heroes from the IT business; one of them is Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of the Indian software company Infosys, who gets the credit for inspiring the title by insisting to Friedman in 2004: "Tom, the playing field is being levelled." But you might say that its real hero is Bangalore, or Bangalore as Friedman sees it: the leading example of how a city populated by clever, ambitious, English-speaking technicians in what is still known as the developing world can use the tools of the new information age to abolish geography - to undercut European and American costs so much, with no (or better) effect on quality, that it destroys the historic advantages of adjacency, when the counting house was best placed next to the warehouse and the warehouse next to the factory.

The 600 pages of Friedman's book radiate a gung-ho optimism, and perhaps for that reason it is more widely read in India, a country that for most of the 20th century suffered the pessimistic prognoses of the outside world, than in Britain. To look for a British equivalent you might have to go back to Samuel Smiles and his Victorian testaments to hard work and self-help and his glorification of the great engineers. As I went around Bangalore this month I often thought of Smiles and the first industrial revolution - of its ruthlessness and chaos, its model factories and choked sewers, its slums and philanthropists, yet running through its new kind of people, freshly urbanised and adapting to the factory clock, the thread of a belief that they were at the centre of a new kind of world.

Arun Pai, my guide that morning, is an example of this new kind of person, or new at least in India. Inspired by the walking tours of London, he created a small company, bangalorewalks.com, and every Sunday he leads groups of people through the history of the city as manifested in its monuments, churches, parks and barracks. At this, he is quite brilliant; from plain and obscure objects he can draw stories that take you to Napoleon and the conquest of Everest. To listen to him, Bangalore has been affecting the course of global history ever since Lord Cornwallis took it from Tipu Sultan in 1791.

But walking tours aren't how Pai makes his real money. That comes when a software company, usually American, asks him to introduce one of its newly arrived executives to India: the bewildering totality of it. Pai has a one-day course. He takes them in his car to the famous Friedman site, to the ancient Hindu temple behind the new Marks & Spencer's, to the new suburbs and shopping malls. He may recall a few recent cultural references, such as the American passive verb, to be "Bangalored", meaning to lose one's job to cheaper competition overseas. He can do Hinduism in five minutes. Most of the questions are about cows, but beggars and caste are also popular topics. He has persuasive answers for the innocent from Kansas, and to demonstrate and sharpen his skills he asked me to ask him any question at all about noticeable aspects of India. I asked why it was that Indian advertising never depicted any human being with a skin shade darker than olive, when so many of the population, especially in the south, were by no means so light. Pai said that it was just a local edition of a universal fact: the enduring appeal of whiteness. But he agreed that this answer might not satisfy an American executive who happened to be black, or indeed anyone from a society that has adjusted to multiculturalism in way that India, for all its divisions of religion, language and caste, has not.

Later that Sunday morning, Pai took a group of us along the city's main thoroughfare, MG (Mahatma Gandhi) Road, in search of bungalows. The Victorian bungalow and its shady garden were once the trademarks of Bangalore - "India's garden city". Only a few survive. Land is too valuable and its price increases every week. "Take pictures, take pictures," Pai said when we stood in front of one. "It may not be here when you next come." In 10 years, people say (and perhaps hope), the city will look like Dubai or Singapore. Some of it already does.

Go back 60 years. Does the story of Bangalore's rise symbolise the larger history of independent India? Yes and no. In 1947, Bangalore contained about 500,000 people and has about six million now; the fifth largest city in India. In the same period, India's population, now 1.12 billion, has multiplied by a factor of three rather than Bangalore's 12, but urban growth rates that are much higher than the national average aren't unusual. When I first came to Bangalore in 1976, I didn't feel I'd left India behind. The same restrictions on consumption, the same brakes to aspiration, applied as much here as anywhere else in the country. Under the regime of Indira Gandhi (and of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, before her), the Indian middle class grew to a kind of noble austerity in the cause of national self-reliance. On the other hand, even then, Bangalore was clearly exceptional. It was tidier, neater, greener, English was more readily spoken, a striking number of church towers poked above the trees in a country where, outside the far south, Christianity had made very little impact. Above all, there was (and is) the climate. Bangalore is 3,000ft above sea level, protected by its height from the enervating heat; the British called it a "no-fan station". When I asked Nandan Nilekani of Infosys how he explained the IT industry's attraction to Bangalore he made all these points - "It's the most middle-class, Anglicised, cosmopolitan city in India, with a better quality of life" - and added another: that a scientific and technical tradition already existed in the city, thanks to the aircraft and electrical instruments businesses that the government of India located there in the 1950s and 60s, militarily strategic factories that were as far away as possible from the borders of Pakistan and China, India's potential enemies. During the 1980s, even before economic liberalisation, it became known as the fastest-growing city in Asia.

It is also, as the historian Ramachandra Guha says, a mongrel kind of town: the only place in India where you can watch films in six Indian languages. Partly, this is British doing. After Cornwallis dethroned Tipu Sultan and restored the kingdom of Mysore to its former Hindu rulers, the British built an army cantonment on the high ground outside the gates of Bengaluru, which in the local language, Kannada, was the name of the town they had captured. The cantonment grew in size to become a "civil and military station" which drew thousands of Tamil craftsmen, tradesmen and servants, as well as Persian horse traders and British civil servants and brewers. A large Anglo-Indian population became established. Missionaries opened schools, a great park was laid out, exotic trees imported, courts and administrative offices built. The lingua franca of this new town, Bangalore, was English; just down the road in the narrow lanes of Bengaluru they continued to speak in Kannada.

The two towns became one municipality in 1949, but the differences between them persist. In Bangalore, I met men in their early middle-age, raised in the old city, who said that until their late teens they had never travelled the mile to the cantonment; and who had been warned by their parents that, when they did, they had better avoid the temptations of bars and hotels.

Bangalore became the capital of the new state of Mysore (since 1973, Karnataka) when the Indian state boundaries were redrawn in 1956. The official language of Karnataka is Kannada. But thanks to the successive flows of migrants from other Indian states, only about 30% of Bangalore's inhabitants claim it as their first language. That means the city has no dominant majority, a welcoming absence as far as new migrants and businesses are concerned but a fretful one for the native Kannada speaker, who, if he lacks English, may feel excluded from the new consumer culture of his own capital city.

Consequently, in what some Bangaloreans consider a political sop to the natives, Bangalore will be renamed Bengaluru within the next year or two. When it appears in airline timetables and on departure boards, a stranger might imagine that the new, more Indian name reflects a new, more Indian reality on the ground. But the opposite will be the case.

A good way to understand what has happened to Bangalore is to look at a street map. In the old city, the Kannada names, many centuries old, come from castes and occupations and bazaars. In the cantonment, the source of the names is obvious enough: Brigade Road, Infantry Road, Church Street. Then, to judge from the parentheses, a burst of patriotic renaming took place - Sir Mirza Ismail Nagar (Richmond Town), Field Marshall Cariappa Road (Residency Road) - though to no effect on how people think and speak of these places. In the suburban spread of the 1960s and 70s, the streets renounce any claim to history or romance, as though Stalin was in charge of the naming department. In Indiranagar, named after Indira Gandhi, the main street is One Hundred Feet Road: that is its width. Many streets are simply numbered, as are localities: a visitor can spend many hours in an auto-rickshaw looking for 597, 15th Cross Road, JPNagar Phase Two. But now that anonymity, these plain square houses in their numbered streets, no longer satisfies new money. The names and architecture of the most recent settlements, high-rises and gated communities could be described as postmodern or pre-post-colonial: Buckingham Court, Windsor Residency, Palm Meadows, 10 Downing Street. Some quite small houses have castellated battlements. The word "Residency", the title the British gave to the homes of senior imperial administrators, is very popular.

"People here speak of 'get-up'," an architect told me as we had dinner in a hotel. "They say to each other, 'What kind of get-up is your new house going to have? Mediterranean? English Castle?' They think they can do anything - anything! - and they want to shove it in your face." In the hotel bar, young Bangalorean men were braying and drinking - the sound carried across the hotel gardens. They weren't poor; this was an expensive hotel. A phrase that the former Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne coined in the red-braces 1980s came to me: bourgeois triumphalism.

I came to Bangalore a few times in the 1980s and stayed in the homes of my then father-in-law, first in Indiranagar and then in the old Anglo-Indian colony of Whitefield. The sights and sounds I associate with these places were, and in most places still are, common to all India. You would go to sleep to the sound of the chowkidar, the night watchman, tapping his stick and blowing his pea whistle. In the morning there would be the cawing of crows and the cries of an early street pedlar, selling vegetables from a stall on wheels. Sometimes an occasional car would honk. The Whitefield house is now a restaurant, the Eurochine, and in Indiranagar they are tearing down 30-year-old houses all the way down the Hundred Feet Road to make way for the stores of the global brands: Benetton, Nike, Levis. Cars queue impatiently down every street and turning.

It does no good to be wistful. A bright young science graduate can expect a starting salary of at least 270,000 rupees (about £3,400) a year as a software engineer, and within a year or two will be earning far more than the professor who taught him. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people work in Bangalore's IT industry and not all of them will be so prosperous; call-centres, now referred to dismissively as IT's "low-hanging fruit", pay far less. The great majority, however, will earn far more than their parents. Rent and property are expensive - at the top end, a Bangalore flat can cost £1m - but credit is cheap. This new middle class has cars and takes holidays abroad (eight days in Singapore for £150). The very rich have servants and a manager to manage them. A servant - a driver, a cook - can double his salary by learning English. If the new recruit joins Infosys, which has become India's most applauded company, he or she will travel each day to a "campus" at Electronic City, which has a putting green, an orchard, a swimming pool, free bikes to get around, and a canteen that serves 14 different cuisines (one of them Jain, which omits garlic and onions). In recent years, more foreign chief executives and heads of state have visited this campus than the Taj Mahal, or so it is said, and "the Infosys tour" has become a cliche of books and TV documentaries. And of course, after getting out of your golf buggy and ascending one of the taller buildings, you can look out through the plate glass and see the slums beyond the fence, where a small boy is defecating next to a stray dog and the ditch runs black. India: land of contrasts. But supposing this replica of Silicon Valley were to disappear? The slum, the stray dog, the black ditch, the defecating child - all these would still be there.

Philanthropy is popular. Infosys has a foundation devoted to good works. Quite separately, Nandan Nilekani's wife, Rohini, estimates she has spent about $40m (£20m) of their money on children's educational and water projects, mainly in village India, over the past few years. This is a lot. Then again, her husband is one of Infosys's seven founders. When the company went public in 1993, 100 shares cost 9,500 rupees. The same shares today would be worth 24,440,000 rupees, 3,000 times their flotation value. (Many more people have benefited than the founders; stock options were once given to all employees, who now number about 80,000.) "It's just no use being an island of prosperity in this country, it isn't going to work," Rohini Nilekani said when I went to see her in her charity's office, and in that statement hover two large black clouds.

The first is inadequate, sometimes collapsing, infrastructure: roads, railways, sewers, drinking water, schools, electricity. The second is the growing divide between urban and rural India. Despite increasing urbanisation, about 70% of the population still live in agricultural villages. The reverse side of the economic liberalisation that made India's software industry possible is the crisis of Indian agriculture. Poor crop prices, exhausted soil, expensive fertiliser, falling water tables, and land that needs to sustain too many livelihoods: so far this year 1,000 Karnataka farmers are said to have killed themselves. And yet the odd thing, the thing that a more curious American executive might ask their guide, Arun Pai, is: given that the price (80 rupees, about £1) of a six-minute local call from my grand hotel surpasses the daily wage of the sugar-cane cutter in a field a few miles away, how come there is so little anger and unrest in Bangalore? The best answer to this question came from another software entrepreneur, Subroto Bagchi, who runs MindTree Consulting (its clients include Avis and Royal Mail). I went to see him at his house. He offered tea and when I said yes, went away to make it and brought it on a tray himself - striking behaviour; never before, in 30 years' experience of India, have I ever seen any Indian man of above average wealth do anything so humbly domestic.

Bagchi, like many other Indian IT success stories, likes to stress his middle-class origins, a term that has a more egalitarian implication in India than in Britain. Indian businesses in the past tended to be run by caste-based dynasties, with money and trading (as well as political) know-how inherited by succeeding generations. Bagchi's father, on the other hand, worked as a government officer in a remote, un-electrified district of Orissa State; Nilekani's father managed a textile mill; village postmen, teachers and railway ticket-collectors appear proudly in the biographies of others. According to Bagchi, it demonstrates the truth of the saying that the Indian IT business succeeded "not because who we knew but because what we knew" and having to compete in a global market without political protection.

I asked about the prospects of discontent, given the disparities of wealth in Bangalore. Bagchi said: "Tell me, where is the angst, where is the senseless killing? They're not even restless. They're not just content, they're quite grateful. Most people, labourers, maidservants, are making a better living. It doesn't occur to my driver that he has every right to be as well-dressed as I am. Just doesn't occur to him. You have to understand, we don't have a sense of urgency, our civilisation is 3,600 years old. For most Indians, it's been an upgrade from coach to business class. They're grateful to be where they are".

Ian Jack began writing about India as a foreign correspondent in 1977 and lived for a time in Delhi and Calcutta. He edited the Independent on Sunday and then Granta magazine and now writes a Saturday column for the Guardian.

High wages drive an American company to quit Bangalore

2007-07-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

FInancial Times (U.K.) 1 July 2007
Bangalore wages spur 'reverse offshoring'
By Richard Waters in San Francisco

The rising cost of paying engineers in Bangalore has prompted at least one Silicon Valley start-up to save money by closing its Indian engineering centre and moving the jobs back to California.

While this "reverse offshoring" remains unusual, it points to a broader belief in the US technology industry that the savings that drove software engineering jobs to India’s technology capital are quickly eroding.

Like.com, a search engine company that uses image recognition software to find pictures on the web, took the step of closing in India after seeing the wages of top-level engineers in some cases rise close to US levels.

"Bangalore wages have just been growing like crazy," Munjal Shah, chief executive, complained in a blog post. In the next few months, Like.com would have had to lift the salary of one of its Bangalore engineers to 75 per cent of the US level, even though the same engineer earned only 20 per cent as much as an equivalent US-based worker two years ago, Mr Shah said.

The extra costs of running a separate office in India and the difficulties caused by the 12 and a half hour time difference from California meant the pay gap no longer made it worth staying, he wrote.

Other Silicon Valley executives report that while other parts of India remain inexpensive, salaries in Bangalore have been rising rapidly towards those of the Valley itself.

"The differential in India is very small now," said Rick Prime, chief financial officer of Tool Wire, an online education company based near San Francisco, although his company has not brought jobs back to the US.

"If you're a small company, saving 20 per cent isn't going to make a lot of difference," said Brij Singh, co-founder of Apptility, a Valley software start-up that has 20 employees in India.

Femmes fatales victimize lonely drivers

2006-11-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

This is just too good. Best part is the last paragraph. "BPO" jobs are jobs in call centers as customer service agents (BPO stands for "business process outsourcing").

Bunty aur Babli on Bangalore roads

Deccan Herald

Many men folks' heads hang in shame; others prefer to be tightlipped about their terrible experience but some dared to open up even though they refused to give a written complaint to police.

It's the latest con job in town. Sexy temptresses thumb rides in flashy cars and rip off men who have been gullible enough to bite the bait.

Deccan Herald caught up with some middle-aged men who became poorer after a moment of weakness. Some of them even saw their laptops vanishing right in front of their eyes.

Arun (name changed), a realtor, was furious while narrating his week-end evening escapade.

"On a Saturday evening, I happened to come across a well-endowed girl on Lavelle Road. I stopped the car; she coyly got into it and initially behaved like a goody goody girl and let me do the talking. I got carried away and offered to take her on a long drive. We snacked at a joint on the outer ring road and when I tried to make advances, she refused but held my hand saying: 'not this time, drop me back near M G Road', and promised to meet me another time.

Midway, she took my cell phone and while pretending to play games she browsed the numbers. When the time came to drop her, she refused to get out of the car and threatened me that she was going to scream and create a scene if I didn't part with my wallet. I was simply shocked."

When Arun resisted and decided to call the police, she said: "Come let's go. I have your residence and office numbers. I too know how to pin you down."

Fearing ugly consequences, Arun said he struck a deal. She asked for Rs 15,000 and settled for Rs 12,000. The poor guy had to tap his ATM.

Another friend of Arun, a techie, too, shared a similar experience. In his case, when he refused to part with cash, she walked away with his laptop.

Police say most of these con girls have good communication skills and play on the male psyche. They also seem to get a kick out of it, bored as they are with the drudgery of BPO and new economy jobs.

posted by The Bangalorean @ 11/26/2006 08:54:00 AM

Dept of I don't know whether to laugh or cry

2006-10-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

This is so unbelievable on so many levels that I just don't know what to say.

The Independent (U.K.), 22 October 2006

India's call centres: 'Dens of debauchery and vice'

The Catholic Church has waded into the controversy over reports of rampant promiscuity in India's 24-hour call centres

By Justin Huggler in Delhi

India's booming call-centre industry has been getting a bad press, what with the arrest of a bank employee who stole hundreds of thousands of pounds from UK customers' accounts, and documentaries exposing security shortcomings. But the Catholic Church has found something else that it's much more worried about: sex.

Stories have been emerging for some time of promiscuity in the 24-hour centres. There was the call centre where the drains were choked with condoms. And the woman worker who told the press that she and her colleagues went to work with condoms in their bags.

Hardly a cause for concern by Western standards. But in India, where attitudes to sex remain highly conservative, it has caused a minor scandal. Which is where the Catholic Church has come in, offering counselling and week-long retreats for call-centre workers "in the hope of turning staff away from a life of sin".

"We don't want to do moral policing," the Archbishop of Bangalore, Bernard Moras, said. "But we want to advise young people that being 'modern' doesn't mean losing family traditions or moral values."

The reason call centres have become the scene of sexual liaisons is simple, according to those who work in them. It's one of the few places young men and women find themselves working together late at night. This is a country where most people still have a husband or wife chosen by their parents in arranged marriages. But battle lines are being drawn between those traditional values and a younger generation that views the world differently.

There is a sexual revolution going on in India. The young, at least those from the middle classes, date in a way their parents could never have dreamt of. In the big cities, more and more nightclubs and bars are opening up where men and women can socialise freely.

In Delhi this year, plastic surgeons say they have seen a 40 per cent rise in demand for cosmetic surgery in the months leading up to this weekend's Diwali festival - with men as well as women seeking nose jobs.

But there has been a moral backlash from conservatives, of which the Catholic Church's foray into call centres is a typical example. In Bombay and Bangalore, local governments have ordered police to start enforcing licensing hours.

Bombay's dance bars, where clients could ogle the dancing girls, have been victims of the moral fervour, closed down by the state government.

In part, the politicians are pandering to the vote from the millions of poor who still cannot lead the more sexually freewheeling lifestyle of the middle classes, and look on it with resentment.

A survey of call-centre workers last year found that 38 per cent believed premarital sex was morally acceptable and a quarter regularly had casual sex. The church can hold its retreats, but it seems that the sexual revolution has got hold of India.

General strike

2006-10-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

A political faction initiated a planned general strike (or "bandh") today in Bangalore to draw attention to an obscure state border issue. here is a news story. According to blogs, little actually happened, but everyone took the day off.

Times of India, 4 Oct 06

India's IT hub hit by bandh

BANGALORE: A statewide 12-hour bandh called by pro-Kannada outfits Wednesday on the Maharashtra-Karnataka boundary issue affected normal life in the country's very own Silicon Valley. Large parts of Karnataka were also affected by it.

The bandh, which began at 6 AM, has been called by Karnataka Border Agitation Committee, an umbrella body of Kannada outfits. In Bangalore, most of the shops and commercial establishments remained closed.

The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) ran skeletal services in the morning. However, officials said that the continuation of the transport services would depend on the situation.

Activities in the film industry have also come to a halt.

The bandh has been called to press for the implementation of Mahajan Commission report on Maharashtra-Karnataka boundary row and to protest what the organisers called "step-motherly" treatment of the state by the Centre.

Most IT companies in the country's technology hub also remained closed due to disruption of transport service. However, employees have been asked to work on Saturday.

Government employees have been asked by their associations to go on leave to express their support for the bandh. Cable operators have also blacked out non-Kannada channels.

Nearly 60,000 police personnel and home guards have been deployed across the state with forces also drawn from neighbouring Tamil Nadu. In Bangalore, police have deployed City Armed Reserve and Rapid Action Force.

Meanwhile, a report from border town Hosur in Tamil Nadu said inter-state road traffic was badly hit. Hundreds of vehicles, including buses, have piled up on the national highway near the border.

Ruling coalition partners in Karnataka, BJP and JD(S), have also extended support to the bandh.

Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy, had, however, appealed to the bandh organisers to call it off. He said that the state had already conveyed a message to the Centre and Maharashtra at the special session of the legislature held last week in Belgaum. His appeal was turned down by the bandh organisers.

At the session, held for the first time outside Bangalore and significantly in Belgaum which borders Maharashtra, Karnataka had asked the Centre to implement the Mahajan Commission report in toto.

The Mahajan Commission report, submitted in 1967, had declared that Belgaum, on which Maharashtra stakes its claim, was an integral part of Karnataka and had recommended transfer of a certain number of Marathi speaking areas in the state to Maharashtra and Kannada speaking areas in the neighbouring state to Karnataka.

Indianism of the day: 'military hotel'

2006-09-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

According to this Bangalore Metroblog posting, a military hotel is a restaurant that serves "non-vegetarian food in local style."

Trickle-down in Bangalore: all politics is local

2006-09-12T14:01:00.000-07:00

This post blew my mind: on a visit to a certain ward of the city, the mayor of Bangalore gave away:

* 60 driving licences
* 60 sewing machines
* 219 embroidery stipend
* sports material
* 100 saplings, and
* 26 medical cheques of Rs 5,000 each.

It brings to mind nothing so much as a Mexican drug lord visiting his village of birth to give away soccer balls, bottles of tequilla and rosaries. So that's what politics in India is really like!

Indianism of the day: "on the anvil"

2006-09-04T22:06:00.000-07:00

On the anvil, adj., "in progress" or "under construction":

Several mega projects offering international lifestyles are on the anvil.

-- from a real estate page

Hotels charge more for non-Indians

2006-07-17T15:36:00.000-07:00

According to this blog post, Bangalore hotels are charging more for non-Indians:

I am expecting a guest tomorrow night, and I called a local hotel for a room. The lady said good luck; we have a room open tomorrow night. Great, I said and then she asked what's the nationality of your guest. I wondered how that mattered. Then I learnt that this hotel's rates are Rs 7300 a night for Indian nationals. And US $ 245 (about Rs 11000) a night for non-Indians!

What the hell? Do foreign tourists consume more towels, bath soaps and tissue rolls or what? Or does the hotel just switch off air conditioning and hot water for their Indian guests? I tried arguing, but no use. I was told they have a "policy" like that!

Utterly incompetent traffic engineering

2006-07-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

This story illustrates the utter incompetence of whoever is doing urban planning and traffic management in Bangalore. Authorities opened -- two years late -- a "flyover" which would supposedly alleviate congestion at a traditional sore spot. Instead, it made things worse.

Wow -- who expected that??

Newly-opened flyover comes a cropper

Deccan Herald

It appears as though the solution itself ended up becoming the problem. A day after Bangaloreans were 'gifted' the Koramangala-Indiranagar link flyover on Airport Road, road users on Thursday had to put up with an even bigger traffic jam.

The areas around the newly-inaugurated flyover, including residential ones, were choked with traffic during peak hours, pushing people to take deviations or long detours to reach their destination. While on the one end, traffic from Koramangala piled up on the flyover itself, there was heavy congestion till the Indiranagar 12th Main junction located over 500 metres away from the flyover.

The reasons

First, the flyover road narrows down to half of its width at a junction on 100 Feet Road, Indiranagar, few metres away from the flyover. Traffic being allowed to move on all roads and the absence of traffic signals, only exacerbates the pell-mell.

Secondly, the right turns were closed on 100 Feet Road, making the traffic coming from Koramangala towards the airport, travel extra distances to take a U-turn. Many were forced to venture into residential lanes, triggering jams even there. Chandru, an auto driver, said several roads inside the residential layouts were dead-ends or were 'no entry', making it all the more difficult for vehicles to move about. "This is worse than what I have ever seen," he said.

Deeptha, another road-user, felt the main flyover had failed to deliver what it had promised a few years ago. Deeptha said it took her 40 minutes, instead of the usual 10, to reach Domlur, from Defence Colony, Indiranagar, due to the choc-a-bloc traffic on 100 feet Road. "As the right turns on 100 Feet Road were closed, we were forced to go to Koramangala to reach Domlur. What a mess!," she said.

However, all was calm at the Koramangala end. Sunil, a petty shop owner said there was no traffic congestion and movement of vehicles was smooth throughout the day.

Police reaction

Meanwhile, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Traffic-East) M A Saleem said the traffic department will study the traffic movement near the flyover for the next two to three days, before planning the future course of action. "We may have to introduce new medians and U-turns to streamline traffic flow. This will be done in the next one or two weeks," he added.

posted by The Bangalorean @ 7/14/2006

Road dug up after completion

2006-07-12T14:52:00.000-07:00

When it came time to inauguate a new roadway, workers dug up part of the just-completed road for a "pandal," which I'm guessing is a sort of VIP platform (see last paragraph).

K'mangala-Indiranagar stretch opens today
Deccan Herald

What was scheduled to happen in 2004, will finally happen today. Road users will finally let out a collective sigh of relief when the long-pending Koramangala-Indiranagar stretch will be inaugurated on Wednesday.

However, the Bangalore Development Authority's Airport Road flyover project, that began in February 2003, is far from over. Only the main flyover, at the intersection of Airport Road and Inner Ring Road junction will be inaugurated. The four loops around the flyover still remain incomplete.

BDA plans to inaugurate one loop a month, which will perhaps drag the final completion to September.

The flyover will be inaugurated by Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy on Wednesday morning at 9.30 am. Those heading to work via Airport Road may be in for slow moving traffic, as the event timing would coincide with peak hour traffic. Vehicular movement will be allowed on the two-way flyover from 11 am onwards.

Will the newly constructed flyover bear signs of 'destruction' on the inaugural day? Some motorists complained on Tuesday that the flyover was dug up on the middle of the newly-laid road to build the pandal for the event. According to Salil Shankar, who works in Indiranagar, "the road was spoilt even before it was inaugurated". Fuming against the organisers, the BDA, Shankar said, "Who is going to finally pay for the repairs? The taxpayer, of course. Is this the level of responsibility the builders have towards their own project?".

They can't keep the power on

2006-06-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

"Transmission and distribution losses" -- I wonder what that means.

B'lore grappling with power cuts
Power situation worsens as distribution companies default
Business Standard

Though reservoirs in Karnataka are nearly full owing to copious rains, the entire state, including Bangalore, is grappling with unscheduled power cuts everyday.

The reason: Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation Limited (KPTCL) and five electricity supply companies (Escoms), which purchase power from the Karnataka Power Corporation Ltd (KPCL), have not paid their dues. Besides, transmission and distribution losses are mounting by the day.

The KPCL supplies nearly 60 per cent of the power consumed (4,989 Mw) in the state while the central allocation is 1,070 Mw. However, for the last two months, KPCL has been forced to make intermittent cuts in power supply to the KPTCL and the five Escoms – Bangalore Escom, Mangalore Escom, Gulbarga Escom, Hubli-Dharwad Escom and Chamundeshwari Escom (for Mysore region) -- due to the non-payment of dues.

The non-payment of dues have hit power generation at KPCL's coal-based units. The worst affected is the Raichur Thermal Power Station (RTPS) since cash shortage from the non-payment of dues is affecting coal purchase.

"We supply power to KPTCL and the Escoms at the rate of Rs 1.40 per unit. But they are clearing the dues in installments. If the government does not direct KPTCL and Escoms to clear the dues at the earliest, the situation will only get worse," a top KPCL official told Business Standard.

KPCL earns an annual revenue of Rs 1,600 crore per year, but its dues from KPTCL and the Escoms have reached Rs 2,800 crore. Besides, the dues are increasing every year by Rs 500 crore-Rs 600 crore as the Escoms are able to pay only about 75 per cent of the billed amount.

The dues, which were around Rs 1,555 crore in 2004, grew to Rs 2,102 crore in 2005. Now, it has reached Rs 2,800 crore.

"Till now, we managed our operations by raising loans at low interest rates. But financial institutions have warned us about the increasing dues, which have surpassed the revenue. It might not be possible for us to raise fresh loans. We may have to cut power generation, which will eventually hit the consumers," he pointed out.

Another worrying factor is the increasing transmission and distribution losses. Though the Karnataka government maintains that transmission and distribution losses have been reduced to 27 per cent, in reality, they are much higher.

A recent joint study by Crisil and ICRA revealed that the transmission and distribution losses in Karnataka was between 30 per cent and 40 per cent.

"It is much less in Bangalore as the cables have been laid underground. Power reforms are yet to be implemented in rest of the state," the official pointed out.

Motorcycle death leads to riot on highway

2006-06-29T09:32:00.000-07:00

Today's word is "lathicharge," which I suppose means that police dispersed the mob with truncheons:

Accident triggers violence on Hosur Road
The Times of India

Bangalore: The traffic jam-stricken Hosur Road had more trouble in store on Wednesday. Vehicles were stranded on Hosur Road and around Electronics City when a road accident turned violent.

Angry locals pelted stones at a private bus and torched it, after it fatally knocked down a woman riding pillion on a motorcycle. Traffic piled up on either side of Electronics City for nearly two hours before the damaged bus were cleared.

Around 2.30 pm, Vimala was returning with her husband, Arun Kumar, residents of Ulsoor, after a cardiac check-up for their child at a hospital off NH-7. A private bus knocked down the vehicle from behind and the woman was run over near Hosa Road junction. Kumar and their child escaped. The driver, however, fled the scene.

Within minutes, irate locals pelted stones at the bus after the passengers got off. Locals shouted slogans against authorities for inaction over regulating traffic on the busy stretch. The situation turned volatile when some miscreants attacked other buses and set fire to the bus that knocked down the two-wheeler. The few cops at the junction stood mute spectators till reinforcements arrived.

The angry mob resisted police from clearing the damaged bus forcing the latter to resort to lathicharge. After the crowd dispersed, it took nearly an hour to tow away the damaged bus.

Indianism of the day: 'seized of'

2006-06-22T10:55:00.000-07:00

From a story on Bangalore Buzz, this odd construction:

The State Government is yet to take a decision on the final alignment of the Byappanahalli-Mahatma Gandhi Road section of the proposed Rs. 6,300-crore Bangalore Metro Rail, work on which is being inaugurated on Saturday by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

But Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd. (BMRC) said the Government was seized of the matter.

What?

Sometimes I get the idea that people are just making things up as they go along.

Indianism of the day

2006-06-21T10:15:00.000-07:00

From a story on the BMP (the city council) suddenly shutting down coffee kiosks:

The coffee shop industry is naturally dismayed. “The BMP didn’t give us any time to even gather our defences. They slapped us with a notice and asked us to down shutters immediately. We hold valid licences till 2007. They told us that it was cancelled. Apparently they’ve discovered a ‘new’ law that allows for a setback area for every building, in which one may not carry out any commercial activity through temporary structures. Permanent structures are okay, but not temporary. This is very foxing,” says one spokesperson.

Noise pollution a growing problem

2006-06-14T13:42:00.000-07:00

From http://bangalorebuzz.blogspot.com/:

The itch of the pitch in IT Bangalore
Deccan Herald

Noise pollution in the IT capital of India, Bangalore, is inching towards alarming proportions. The noise levels at some of the major roads and public places in the City are well above the permissible limit, according to Mysore-based All India Institute of Speech and Hearing (AIISH). Same is the situation in Chennai.

With the rise in vehicular traffic, noise pollution has gone up considerably in the cities. In fact, the most alarming levels of noise were heard in hotels where the noise levels reached up to 88 dB.

More at http://bangalorebuzz.blogspot.com/2006/06/itch-of-pitch-in-it-bangalore.html

Child labor still rife in India

2006-06-13T15:54:00.000-07:00

BBC News, 13 Jun 06

Child labour -- India's 'cheap commodity'

By Navdip Dhariwal
BBC News, Tamil Nadu

Farm workers toil long hours in the fields in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu for little reward in the intense heat.

But it is often their only means of survival.

Cheap labour is one commodity India has in abundance. Hidden from public view though, is another workforce.

In an isolated spot, miles from the nearest town, is a thriving matchstick industry.
Here inside makeshift straw huts -- and in the small dwellings that neighbour them -- we found some of India's youngest workers.

Rows of exhausted young girls -- up to 20 and as young as five are working alongside their mothers. For 16 hours a day their tiny blistered fingers skillfully turn out matches for export.

Ordered to leave

The toxic smell of sulphur is overwhelming in the windowless room.

Twelve-year-old Sindhu dips the tips of the sticks into hot sulphur. "I start work early but don't finish until late into the night. I get paid less than two dollars a week."

Our presence was clearly not welcome. As we were speaking to the girls the owner came in and ordered us to leave.

Within walking distance are other factories. But again, when we arrived, the youngest workers were quickly led away.

While the factory owner denied he was employing underage workers, almost every single household in this part of Tamil Nadu has one or more children working long hours in appalling conditions.

Campaigners say over 11 million children are forced to work in India.

Exploited

Lighting a fire for a rare family meal, Sarojama gathers her five grandchildren around her.

She has barely been able to feed them, so she was forced to borrow money from a local factory owner. Unable to pay back the loan she sent her young grand-daughter to work. Parimeeta was taken out of school and has been working 12 hour days for two years.

The debt is less than $20.

Campaigners fear that as India's economy continues to boom, children are increasingly being exploited to meet the country's hunger for global success.

In a recent raid in the capital Delhi, police rescued a large number of boys from local sweatshops. Agents had lured them from India's poorest regions, promising the children that they would be taken care of and paid well.

They were found hidden on the top floors of garment factories -- held captive in filthy cramped rooms under lock and key. They painstakingly spent hours applying crystals to garments. Many of the clothes end up being sold in shops in the UK.

Ineffective

These are places the authorities say are difficult to close down.

But Swami Agnivesh of the Bonded Liberation Front says that hundreds of children are kept hidden from public view in the buildings of crammed alleyways. "They are kept in the most appalling conditions and not enough is being done to help them," he said.

India has laws in place to protect children and bans the use of young workers, but they remain pretty ineffective.

The United Nations Children's' Fund says that the sheer volume of children engaged in work is living proof of the world's failure to protect them. That is the reason why the agency's work is focused on building a protective environment which safeguards children from exploitation and abuse.

In Tamil Nadu local charities have helped pay off families' debts so that at least some children can be released from the matchstick factories. Finally freed from the shackles of work, they now have some hope of reliving their childhood.

But it is often a dream that is short-lived. Charity workers admit most of the children are likely to find themselves forced back into a life of bondage.

CHILD LABOUR 2006
218m aged 5-17 in work
126m in hazardous work
Almost 50m work in Africa
122m work in Asia
70% of workers in agriculture
Estimated cost of ending child labour: $760m over 20 years
Source: International Labour Organisation

Speaking of sweatshops, compare this article about the Chinese factory where iPods are assembled.

Apple bails from Bangalore 6 months after arriving

2006-06-13T14:39:00.000-07:00

I was surprised this got so little notice when it happened a couple weeks ago.

Business Week, 5 June 2006

Technology
By Manjeet Kripalani and Peter Burrows

Apple Follows its Instincts Out of India

CEO Steve Jobs may have a soft spot for India, but the economic reality is, building a technical support center there doesn't make sense

Apple Computer (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs has always had a thing about India. While he was a young technician at game developer Atari (ATAR) in the mid-'70s, Jobs took a break and backpacked around India with a college friend in search of spiritual enlightenment. Not long after returning to the U.S., his more capitalistic instincts primed, he and Steve Wozniak launched Apple in 1976. Today, Jobs is known in India and through much of the rest of the world as an entrepreneur-turned-billionaire and one of the savviest marketing minds on the planet.

He is also a tough-minded executive who knows when to cut and run when the numbers don't add up. That's why Apple has shelved plans to build a sprawling offshore technical support center in Bangalore. Just months ago, there was talk of Apple employing 3,000 workers by 2007 who would handle technical and customer-service support for Macintosh computers and other Apple gear in India and elsewhere. There was even speculation that Jobs would travel to India in the fall to publicize Apple's commitment to the country.

It wasn't meant to be, and a small, newly hired staff of about 30 at Apple's subsidiary in Bangalore was let go recently. (The company will maintain a small sales and marketing arm in the city.) Apple spokesman Steve Dowling would only say the company had "reevaluated our plans" and decided to focus support center activities in other countries.

SOME QUESTIONS. However, another source familiar with the situation said the decision was mostly cost-driven. "India isn't as inexpensive as it used to be," the source said. "The turnover is high, and the competition for good people is strong." The company feels it "can do it more efficiently elsewhere."

Such talk comes amid concerns about the sustainability of India's fast-track economy. True, India's economy grew 9.3% last quarter, and it is still home to the world's largest, fasting-growing offshore outsourcing sector, which generates about $17.3 billion in revenues and employs nearly 700,000 people, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. And Indian outfits such as Infosys (INFY) and Tata are among the best-managed companies in the emerging markets.

Yet India's benchmark stock Sensitive Index, or Sensex, experienced a mini-crash in late May as global investors fled from emerging market stocks (see BW Online, 5/23/06, "India's Market Turns Down the Heat").

INDIAN BRAINPOWER. And India's fabled infrastructure headaches and surprisingly robust wage growth have also raised worries about India's undisputed leadership as a business outsourcing Mecca. Entry-level wages have climbed by as much as 13% annually from 2000 to 2004, while salaries for mid-level managers have registered increases of 30% annually during the same period, to a median of $31,131, according to McKinsey and Nasscom, India's software industry association.

However, while the Apple move certainly will generate plenty of media attention -- "Apple Software Logs Out of India," proclaimed a headline from the Times of India -- it may be a special case. Apple has certainly utilized Indian engineering brainpower in the past. Part of the electronic circuitry that powers the iPod was developed by a research outfit in Hyderabad, for instance.

Yet for the Bangalore operation, Jobs never had any intention of outsourcing any high-end software development and proprietary technology research away from the company's Cupertino headquarters or operations nearby, according to the source familiar with Apple's operations in India.

STRATEGIC TIE-UP. Also, while wages for software engineers and IT project managers have soared, entry level wages for call-center employees are still an affordable $2,500 or so per year. Apple had only a staff about 30 at its Bangalore operation, but "you need economies of scale, say 500," to generate huge savings for a company, says Sunil Mehta, vice-president of Nasscom. Unlike rivals such as IBM-Lenovo, Dell (DELL ), and Hewlett Packard (HPQ ) that have a huge base of personal computer customers, Apple's Mac market share is far lower, undercutting the justification for a huge customer service center on the ground in India.

The Bangalore operation also seemed redundant given that on May 29 Apple announced a strategic tie-up with New Delhi-based HCL Infosystems to provide distribution and after-service care for Apple's phenomenally successful iPod line. HCL has a tremendous distribution and service footprint in the country and has worked successfully with Nokia (NOK), India's dominant mobile phone brand. "We will put Apple products through the same distribution network as we do with Nokia, and offer after sales service for all things related to the iPod including iTunes," says Saurav Adhikari, vice-president for strategy with HCL.

Given all that, the economic rationale to build out an Apple-run Bangalore customer service center looked flimsy. Jobs may have a soft spot for India given his youthful spiritual exploration of the country. But when it comes to running a $13.9 billion enterprise like Apple, his capitalistic instincts are likely to win out every time.

Rejoicing at coming of rains

2006-05-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

Apparently 25 degrees C (77 degrees F) seems quite cool to residents of Bangalore, at least following the stifling heat of spring. According to this story, they're practically building snowmen.

It's mon-soon! Bangalore cool, heavenly
The Times of India

Bangalore: After sizzling for two months, Bangalore is now basking in the cloudy, pleasant weather that it's known and loved for.

With the onset of the south-west monsoon quite early, the mercury has dipped from a cruel 37 degrees Celsius and is cooling at a mild 25 degrees. The cloudy sky, strong and intermittent drizzle seem to be the perfect weather for the average Bangalorean. The rainfall has been mild so far, not exceeding 1.8 mm.

According to the Met department, this weather pattern will continue in the coming week. The rain, that is brought in by the moisture-laden south-westerly winds from the Arabian Sea, is likely to go up after that. For the Bangalorean, the monsoon that has set in a week early, has been a pleasant change. The demand in coffee bars has changed from cold coffees and granitas to cappuccinos and warm doughnuts. Teeny-boppers dressed in summer outfits are now sporting jackets and sweatshirts. And every evening, a piping hot snack is almost mandatory with filter coffee in every household. As for the nights, quilts have replaced cotton sheets and airconditioners have been switched off.

Even as Bangaloreans are soaking in the weather, they're not looking forward to heavy rain. "The light drizzle now is simply beautiful and I love every minute of it. But in a few days, there will be power cuts, traffic jams and waterlogging, and so frankly, the rain scares me," says Milan Dheer, a project manager.

posted by The Bangalorean @ 5/30/2006

State will build monorail on its own

2006-05-27T23:28:00.000-07:00

In an answer to the story cited in the last post, Karnataka's Chief Minister announced the state would build the Bangalore monorail on its own, without help from "the Centre" i.e. the national government.

Urban development minister: What monorail?

2006-05-26T10:58:00.000-07:00

Contrary to reports as recent as this week that a private consortium would start building a monorail in Bangalore by the end of the year, the state minister for urban development said he was not aware of any such project.

The Union government has not received any proposal regarding implementation of Mono Rail in Karnataka. Kumaraswamy met me in New Delhi where we discussed the Metro project. I am not aware of this new proposal and I don’t want to react on the issue.

No wonder nothing gets done.

Monorail in Bangalore?

2006-05-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

The Chief Minister (of what? Karnataka state?) has announced the launch of a momorail project in Bangalore, according to the Times of India. The 18 km. project is expected to cost about $1.4 million. This is in addition to a light rail ("Metro Rail") project also being planned.

'India not a third world country'

2006-05-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

I am planning on going to India this summer for my company, and incidentally to research my novel in progress. Since the trip is work-related, I mentioned in the last "weekly accomplishments" email sent to managers at work that I was going this week to get my shots.

This brought a visit by the VP, who happens to be from Banaglore, asking what my email meant. "What do you mean shots?"

"You know... injections. For travel."

"Do you think you need shots for India? You're not going to a third world country! In fact I asked my wife, who is a physician, 'Is there something going on I don't know about, some need to get shots?' and she said no. So in fact... Unless your doctor has said you need to..."

"Well, no... I just thought..."

"We'll talk later. When are you going? Late July, August, right?"

"The last time we talked about it, we said early July..."

"Well, I'm going in June. We'll talk later. But perhaps late July or August... And no shots."

travel, India

Blog: 'Blame India Watch'

2006-05-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

Courtesy Desicritics.org, I ran across a blog called Blame India Watch, which looks at how Indian call center workers and others who have taken outsourced jobs are scapegoats for "Bush's failing economy."

Bangalore also has malls

2006-05-14T22:17:00.000-07:00

From Bangalore Buzz:

A place for the youngsters to hang out and families to shop

The Hindu

# Malls attract a wide cross section of people
# Brands are categorised product wise
# Different labels are able to feed off one another
# Restaurants and cafes do the best business

BANGALORE: Malls have moved from being the latest fad to a noticeable part of our lives. It is where youngsters go to "hang out", families go for an outing, shopping enthusiasts go on a buying spree, and where various brands desperately seek some space for themselves. But, why there is the desperation? The question many seem to ask is whether these outlets do any business at all. With the majority of people content with various forms of recreation such as movies alongside plain window shopping, does any actual buying take place?

"Why not? Obviously the business is good, or else this wouldn't have been running successfully for two years now," says Naresh, one of the department managers at Bangalore Central. He explains the mall's layout strategy as the key; "It is a seamless mall".

More at Bangalore Buzz.

Another fine mess

2006-05-13T18:00:00.000-07:00

Rain halts city

Tree Crushes Father, Son To Death
Puttenahalli Turns Into Pool Again

The Times of India

Bangalore: Heavy rain and accompanying stormy winds felled many trees, flooded areas like Puttenahalli and created traffic jams in the city on Friday.

An 11-year-old boy and his father were crushed to death by a tree. Murugesh and his father Gullappa (45) were taking shelter in a temporary shed put up by road construction workers when the tree came crashing down, on Binny Crescent Road in JC Nagar around 6 pm. Gullappa’s other son Balu (9) sustained injuries in the leg.

Murugesh died on the spot, while Gullappa succumbed at hospital. The family is from Andhra Pradesh.

On Chamarajpet III Main Road, auto driver Krishnappa was grievously injured when a tree crashed on his vehicle. Passers-by shifted him to hospital where he is said to be out of danger. Another motorist escaped with minor injuries when a tree crashed near Infantry Road, the police said.

The BMP control room said two trees fell opposite CM Kumaraswamy's house in JP Nagar, a tree crashed into DGP Sial’s house on Nrupatunga Road, three trees fell at Jayanagar, two each at Brunton Road and Nandidurg Road, one each near M N Krishna Rao Park, on Promenade Road and M G Road. The horticulture department had recently conducted a survey to identify weak trees.

The rain, which has been lashing the city for the past three days, upset peak-hour traffic at most places. The traffic was held up at Assaye Road, near Ulsoor, for hours and it moved slowly on Richmond Road, Residency Road, Hosur Road, Sarjapur Road, Navarang junction and parts of Malleswaram.

Areas near Ulsoor were flooded. Resident Nauman Khader said, "The Promenade Layout Park is under water. It is up to 3 feet, and there is no outlet. In some low-lying layouts, houses were flooded long after the rain stopped. Construction material and debris have blocked the Ulsoor Lake drain, leading to flooding."

As always, Puttenahalli turned into a pool, with residents having to wade through 3 feet of water on roads. Right in front of Brigade Millennium, where the CM conducted a surprise inspection recently, residents couldn't cross the road. The BMP control room also received complaints from HAL III Stage.

Power shutdowns were reported from various parts of the city. Alice Mani, a resident of Kodichikkanhalli, said power goes out whenever there is rain and for the past three days there have been frequent cuts.

Till 8.30 pm, the city had received 33.6 mm of rain, the Met department said. Met department director A L Koppar explained, "The pre-monsoon rain is responsible for facilitating the monsoon. Rainfall in the second week of May is normal; this time, it has been in good measure. But the past four days have given out a peculiar situation: the skies are clear till the evening and then it pours."

posted by The Bangalorean @ 5/13/2006

Bangalore neighborhood 'in a state of neglect'

2006-05-11T12:01:00.000-07:00

A "stage" is a neighborhood, or part of one; I think it is derived from a "stage" of a housing development that was, at one time at least, ongoing. Also, this story reveals the acronym "CMC" often cited in news stories: City Municipal Council.

Nagarabhavi in a state of neglect

The Hindu

Residents suffer due to bad roads, uncleared garbage

# The layout was formed in 1987 by the BDA and handed over to the CMC for maintenance
# Contractors have dumped debris on either side of the road
# Rs.12 crore earmarked this year for improving amenities

BANGALORE: It is the bad roads in Nagarabhavi Second Stage that caused Mangala Gowri's fall. She was trying to negotiate a U-turn on her scooterette when her leg twisted on one of the loose rocks on the untarred road and she fell.

Ms. Gowri was not immediately able to get an autorickshaw to go to a hospital. She had to limp for over a kilometre to flag one down. "The roads are so bad here that autorickshaws do not come often. When you find one, you have to pay more than the regular fare," she says.

Almost all through Nagarabhavi, the roads are in pathetic condition. On most roads the asphalt has worn away leaving huge craters. Last year's incessant rains and the constant flow of traffic have loosened several of the rocks and pebbles on the untarred roads. The 40-foot main roads and smaller side roads have become narrower because building contractors have dumped debris on either side of the road. Many of the streets do not have streetlights.

S. Prabhakar, Gowri's husband, who travels 15 kilometres on his motorcycle to work, says that he has developed back problems because of bad roads. "My neck and back hurt as I go on the roads. I have to wear a brace for my back at times," he says.

Balakrishna Rao, vice-president of the Nagarbhavi Residents' Association, says the maintenance of the layout has been neglected for the past few years. The layout was formed in 1987 by the Bangalore Development Authority and handed over to the city municipal council for maintenance. "For the past few years, we are suffering due to bad roads and poor maintenance of amenities," he says. He adds that the residents of Nagarbhavi held a protest to highlight the poor condition of the roads a few months ago. "But the situation has not improved," he says.

Throughout the layout, plastic bags and waste lie scattered by the side of the road as garbage bins overflow. "The garbage cans are not even cleaned once a week. No one comes to collect the garbage," says Mr. Rao.

Residents complain that the uncleared garbage is raising a stink in the area as well as causing health problems. "There are too many flies and mosquitoes in the area now. Several children are falling sick," says Ms. Gowri.

Areas that have been earmarked as parks are also a picture of neglect. They are overgrown with weeds and cannot be used for any recreational activity by the residents. "We cannot walk in the park because it is overgrown with weeds and we cannot walk on the road because there are no lights," says Ms. Gowri. D.L. Narayana, Commissioner of the Rajarajeswari Nagar City Municipal Council, said parks would be beautified this year. "It is part of our action plan," he said. He said Rs.12 crores had been earmarked this year for improvement of the CMC of which Rs. 5 crore would be utilised for civil works. Tenders had been called for asphalting works.

posted by The Bangalorean @ 5/11/2006

You think?

2006-05-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

Foreigners feel at home in Bangalore;
Find infrastructure to be a major problem

# Many of them find travelling in the city a problem
# They find people friendly and helpful

The Hindu, 12 May 06

BANGALORE: When foreigners first arrive in Bangalore they are greeted with chaos at the airport with its claustrophobic passageways, yelling taxi drivers, jostling passengers, noise, colour and confusion.

However, their opinion is bound to change when they have had the time and leisure to take in the city at their own pace. Since Bangalore is in essence a crowded, noisy, chaotic city, their initial opinion does not undergo a dramatic change, but other aspects of Bangalore soon begin to make an impression on them.

Rebecca, doing her international traineeship in Accenture, is from Poland and says she rather likes living in Bangalore. However, even to an outsider the problems in our infrastructure are quite apparent and she says that travelling in Bangalore is quite a problem because of the state of our roads. According to her, traffic and pollution is another glaring flaw that detracts from Bangalore's otherwise pleasing atmosphere.

Ursula, also doing her traineeship is from Poland and finds communicating with auto drivers taxing. Travelling by bus is not an alternative for her because she finds it too hard.

She too finds the people friendly but is not taken in by Bangalore's famous weather as is everyone else, finding it "too hot" for her liking.

Ms. Ursula says that she finds the city's plants and trees rather exotic as well as the cuisine. Considering the rate at which western culture has infiltrated our lives and the lengths to which Indian teenagers go in order to emulate them, this is not very surprising. Oddly though, what she really finds unusual about the city is how the houses seem to encroach upon the streets instead of being set apart from the main roads and divided by lawns or gardens, which is what she is used to back home.

Rodolfo from Brazil finds that the main problem lies in the electricity and water supply, which is irregular and unpredictable at best. He describes the profile of the city in one word: competitive. The similarity he finds between his country and Bangalore is concentrated to the areas Frazer Town and Cox Town, which remind him of neighbourhoods in Brazil.

Rosemary, a student of Canadian International School, likes the laidback culture and the fact that one is exposed to so much in this city. However, she does not like how the moneyed elite who vacation in Bangalore bring their snobbery and prejudices along with them and alter the face of an essentially non-biased and simple society. She likes the pleasant weather Bangalore has to offer from November onwards and is a big fan of the city's pub culture.

Damein from Switzerland loves the city and finds it a unique blend of cosmopolitan and ethnic culture.

What really gives him a chance to enjoy the city is the fact that most Bangaloreans know English, not to mention the fact that they are friendly and eager to help. His favourite place in Bangalore strangely enough is City Market.

Damein finds that the IT boom has really set Bangalore apart from other Indian cities.

posted by The Bangalorean @ 5/11/2006

Rain's a-comin'

2006-05-10T15:47:00.000-07:00

bangalorebuzz posted these stories:

Software companies gear for monsoon

This story is almost entirely about other things than the preparations of software companies for the rainy season. When they finally get to software companies in the last graf, they cite exactly one company which has done something to "gear up" -- they've moved stuff up a floor. Other than that, Accenture said they hadn't planned anything, and the only other person quoted, a solitary engineer, said he would "opt for the office vehicle" rather than trying to drive himself.

In other news, this story cites local government preparations, while meanwhile an early rain caused traffic snarls and the Chief Minister -- who I think is sort of equivalent to the provincial governor -- said he was worried.

Perhaps this explains why tourism has never really caught on in Bangalore

2006-05-01T14:13:00.000-07:00

"The poverty that you see at such an in-your-face level, and so much of it, gets really tiring," Anderson said. "You get up and drive to work in the morning, and every day four little girls come up to you and beg for money."

From An Assoc. Press story about Americans working in Bangalore.

Disaster lies ahead, say local papers

2006-04-27T20:14:00.000-07:00

Air pollution pretty bad

B'lore air murkier than Chennai, H'bad
Pollution weighs heavily on City

Deccan Herald, 27 Apr 06

Bangalore's air is worse than that of its two famed southern cousins -- Chennai and Hyderabad -- according to the latest official data, which clearly points out the Garden City's failure to check pollution .....

Bangalore's air is worse than that of its two famed southern cousins -- Chennai and Hyderabad -- according to the latest official data, which clearly points out the Garden City's failure to check pollution compared to other cities in Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

Bangalore's annual level of breathable particles in the air -- 71 micrograms per cubic metre -- is higher than that of Coimbatore, Kozhikode, Hyderabad, Kottyam, Kochi, Tuticorin and Chennai, says the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in its latest air quality monitoring data. Vehicular and industrial pollutions are the two principal sources.

Floods likely during coming rains

Replay of monsoon woes forecast here

Deccan Herald, 27 Apr 06

Is a sequel to last year's october floods waiting to happen this monsoon? Residents of Bilekahalli, Ramanashree and Someshwara layouts on Bannerghatta Road feel this possibility is steadily turning true in their area.

Over 2,000 square feet of land is submerged in sewage water, all because land developers have blocked the water channel from Bilekahalli to Raja Canal. The 20-feet wide valley near Ranka Apartments on Bannerghatta Road which carries all the sewage water of J P Nagar and other adjacent areas has been narrowed down considerably by private builders, says Kumar, a resident of Ramanashree layout. The developers have also raised the landscape to a height of seven to ten feet rendering the layouts, that comprise 150 sites, as 'low-lying' areas, he alleges.

"The encroachments have been steadily increasing in the last one year. As the connecting channels are obstructed, water has stagnated, resulting in mixing of sewage and drinking water.

"Two bores have already been affected due to this," adds Shripal, member of Bilekahalli Residents' Welfare Association.

"We fear flooding each time it rains. We will have no choice but to vacate our houses this rainy season. Large quantity of sewage water is accumulated at the other side of the compound wall of the layout. Any breach of compound wall will definitely bring the sewage water into our houses," Shripal feared.

You can say that again

2006-04-27T11:46:00.000-07:00

Someone is translating U.S. comic strips into Kannada, the local language of Karnataka province, where Bangalore is:

Courtesy Bangalore Metroblog.

Growing divide

2006-04-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

Interesting post by a young privileged woman who is just realizing there is an increasing gap in India between haves and have-nots. Her thoughts are genuine, even if her perspective is ingenuous.

But I now realize that the so-called rapid development the country is experiencing is benefiting the rich and the educated middle class only. There is still a huge sector apart from IT that still needs to develop in order to absorb the non IT people into the development mainstream.

I guess if I was one of them I too would resent the opportunities and benefits some sections are enjoying while I had no scope for such jobs because my qualification is useless for the IT sector. And it is these people who vote for Communists. I saw Achudanandan* speaking to the media yesterday and he scoffed the 'so-called-development agenda' of the Congress. Suddenly it fell into place. There is a huge sea of people out there that are damn scared. Their skills are no longer relevant in the IT centric economy. They fear the development, which they feel, will benefit the IT sector only.

* sic -- it's actually Achuthanandan

Calif. IT honchos were 'marooned in their hotel rooms' during riots

2006-04-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

From The Hindu Business Line newspaper:

When Brand Bangalore took a beating

The Hindu Business Line

The violent aftermath of the death of an iconic film star may have badly dented Bangalore's claims as most-favoured IT destination. Is it a Silicon Valley or a Silicon Volcano waiting to erupt at the slightest provocation

Rarely do seven days pass, without a head honcho of an international technology company or two, passing through Bangalore — and the week gone by, was no exception. A top executive of one of the world's biggest players in the computer storage arena, as well as a key name in networking hardware, were more or less marooned in their hotel rooms for two days. Most of their engagements were cancelled, as the frenzy of violence and arson that followed the death of iconic cinema personality Raj Kumar, engulfed the city.

With little to do — except watch the non-stop coverage on television of burning buses, looting gangs and the odd dead body on the street — the two visiting heads had ample leisure to ponder over the decisions that brought their respective organisations to India's so-called Silicon City.

ANOTHER IT DESTINATION

The networking major had reason to thank his prescience — he had just come from Delhi, having decided to set up the company's newest research centre at Gurgaon, the satellite town that is first emerging as a major Information Technology destination in the North. His visit to Bangalore was more of a recruiting mission — and that could wait for another day.

The storage head had just presided over a session of pumping up of his company's already large development muscle in Bangalore. He was palpably bemused by the way the city responded to the passing away of a beloved father figure — but when this correspondent met him two days ago, he was still upbeat about Bangalore's place in the company's scheme of leadership in its highly competitive niche.

Neither of the visiting executives was ready to write off Bangalore. But for how long? Between them, they represented cumulative investments in this country of around $200 million over the next three years. They— and another thousand like them — represent a reality that is all too often brushed aside as an inconvenient fact when the subject of the city's place in the global ranking of desirable IT destinations is discussed.

Brand Bangalore is a complex combo of happenstance, coincidence and proactive action, going back 26 years, when Texas Instruments first decided to set upa satellite communication dish and create a small Indian brains trust to feed its research and development in digital signal processors back home.

Since then a fortuitous decision to open up the engineering education sector to private enterprise, a generally helpful state administrations and a notably proactive arm of the Centre's Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) have been backed by the cosmopolitan culture and upwardly mobile aspirations of the city's ordinary citizens as well as the commercial class. This typically Indian masala mix of attitudes and opportunities morphed into an international flavour that clicked where it mattered most — in the board rooms of the best information and communication companies of the world.

It is the momentum of such a combination that has made Bangalore the brand that it is today — and let's admit it — the word `Bangalored,' a synonym for having one's job snatched away and handed over to a geeky graduate in Koramangala.

DRAMATIC CHANGE

In late 2003, Newsweek put a picture of Bangalore's International Tech Park on its cover to illustrate its theme: Cutting edge `Capitals of Style'. That was then. Today, if Bangalore pops up in a Google search of world headlines, it usually opens into horror stories of crumbling infrastructure, never ending traffic snarls, erratic power and an increasingly tense and high strung work force which often spends more time coming to and going from work in grandiosely named Electronic Cities than at the work desk.

The compulsions of coalition politics in the State were seen as the main reason why Bangalore appeared to be tragically neglecting all those sectors of a metropolitan administration, deemed crucial to retaining its most valued corporate patrons.

The change of government earlier this year was seen as an opportunity for a fresh start, a new chance to address basic issues such as transport, communication and energy in a hard nosed manner without having to constantly pander to a `them versus us', `rural versus urban' mentality.

There has been some palpable change for the better even if senior administrators in the State still felt compelled to play what many, fed on American police soaps, clearly saw as a "good cop-bad cop" routine: Praise the IT-BT industry today and promise it all sorts of goodies; bash it tomorrow and remind it that `others' matter more.

Last week's orgy of violence was something that no one had factored into any equation of Bangalore's pluses and minuses. An event where sadness should have been reflected in public dignity and grace, was allowed to spiral into a free-for-all where goondaism ruled and genuine outpourings of public sorrow were snuffed out by a mindlessly violent rabble. The post mortem reports are yet to come; but the image of Bangalore has taken an appalling toll. Today, the targets of the mob have been unfocused.

What splinter of provocation will it take, to turn it tomorrow, against all those hundreds of international companies whose glass ensconced high rise headquarters might conceivably be seen as targets upon which to vent one's frustration?

Is Bangalore adequately policed? Does it have the management and the networking to respond to sudden happenings involving huge numbers of people in disaster-like situations? Is it harnessing even a fraction of the high-tech technology that it is supplying to the world, to solve its own problems of urban angst? These are all questions that need to be answered.

UNCOMFORTABLE REALITY

But equally important the city and its government may have to address the uncomfortable reality that many thousands of its citizens have within themselves an uncontrollable rage that is dangerous to ignore. The burning of a dozen buses this week and the tragic loss of life may be an amber signal pointing to larger, unaddressed malcontent. To ignore this is to put at peril all that has gone to create an unbeatable brand name that is the envy of so many other aspiring capitals.

Can a city claim to be an IT capital, if roaming gangs can force a 24X7 industry to down shutters? Will the business process outsourcing and call centre majors — Bangalore's biggest employers — not think twice about operating in an environment where they are forced to declare holidays under pressure, putting at risk their obligations to millions of customers at the end of a telephone line?

The debate whether Bangalore should be called India's Silicon Valley — or Silicon Plateau in view of its special geography — is one of those non-issues that the media throws up every now and then. That may become irrelevant if enough numbers of its hitherto `satisfied customers' decide that it is in fact a Silicon Volcano waiting to erupt at the slightest provocation.

posted by The Bangalorean @ 4/21/2006

Riots: let the analysis begin

2006-04-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from posts on Bangalore Buzz:

Police and fire response were ineffective, some said:

Raj deserved a much better farewell
Deccan Herald

A day after rioters took over Bangalore, Bangaloreans, from retired police officials to IT honchos to film-makers, are yet to come to terms with Thursday's "shameful" developments.

Mr N R Narayana Murthy, Chairman of Infosys Technologies, said "what happened yesterday was really sad for Karnataka".

"Rajkumar was an extraordinary person who wanted the best for Kannada cinema and culture. This is not the way we should have paid our tributes to him. He deserved a much better farewell," he said.

"Yesterday's violence is a blot on Bangalore's image. The public perception of the City is bound to change. The unruly behaviour of mobs is making Bangaloreans feel insecure," said Kannada writer Baraguru Ramachandrappa.

"Rajkumar deserved an honourable funeral, the fans made a mockery of it. Even his family members had to plead with them to give their final farewell. There was nothing right in the last rites," said producer-actor C R Simha.

Police blamed

Several fingers were pointed at the police department, for "poor planning" and "soft handling of the issue".

Retired senior police officials including M D Singh, C Dinakar and H T Sangliana minced no words when they accused the law-keepers of "lack of proactive action".

"Through past experience, the police should have realised that anything related to Rajkumar could spark off unpredictable reactions. There was no contingency plan made in anticipation of violence. The police should have planned Rajkumar's cremation, in coordination with family members, the film industry and the government. Ambiguity regarding Rajkumar's cremation added fuel to the fire," said M D Singh.

Meanwhile, Mr Dinakar believed that public sentiments had no place when the law and order situation was at stake.

"The police should have taken care of the rowdy elements rather than giving them a long rope," said Mr Dinakar, who was heading the State police when riots broke out following Rajkumar's abduction in 2000.

Mr Sangliana pointed out that the police should have arranged for reinforcement of personnel from neighbouring districts.

"Saying that there were not enough forces is a bad excuse," he said.

"Even the response from the fire department was very slow," he added.

Chief Minister says police bear no blame for the chaos that descended on Bangalore following the death of a famous film star.

HDK blames 'forces' for trouble during Raj funeral
Deccan Herald

Chief Minister H D Kumaaraswamy on Friday refuted allegations that the government and administrative machinery had failed to contain mob violence during the funeral procession of actor Rajkumar on Thursday.

He reiterated that the violence was "incited by some people" after reviewing the situation with top police officials.

Speaking to reporters, Mr Kumaaraswamy said the incident is not a black spot on the image of the government. "There are several things I know, which I do not want to discuss in public," he said refusing to name the forces 'responsible' for inciting violence.

He said the situation would have gotten worse and more innocent people could have been affected, had the police not acted with restraint. Police had taken 563 persons into preventive custody after violence broke out following the demise of Rajkumar, he added.

In an editorial, the Deccan Herald said it was a shame -- taking the opportunity to use my new favorite word, "rowdy-sheeters":

The violence that shook Bangalore during the funeral of Rajkumar is a blot on the fair image of the people of the city. It is unfortunate that eight people lost their lives in violence and police firing in the city, including at the Kanteerava Studios, where the thespian, known for his humanistic outlook, was laid to rest. Among the dead was a Karnataka State Reserve Police constable who was lynched by a mob. The earthly remains of the thespian had been kept at the Kanteerava Stadium from Wednesday night till the cortege left on Thursday, for the countless admirers to pay their last respects. Rajkumar held sway over the minds and hearts of the people of the state, and it was only natural that thousands of them turned up to pay their homage to him. The state government and the police should have anticipated the crowd control problems and deployed police personnel in sufficient strength. It is shocking that there were only 2,000 policemen at the Kanteerava Stadium where more than one lakh emotionally-charged people had gathered. The government could have requisitioned additional police personnel from different districts of the state, besides more men from the Central Reserve Police Force.

It is a known fact that rowdy-sheeters and other anti-social elements take advantage of crowds to kill people, loot shops and houses, and set fire to vehicles and shops. As soon as the government received information about the death of Rajkumar, the police ought to have rounded up all rowdy-sheeters in Bangalore. But they did not as they failed to realise the gravity of the situation, though they have in the past -- particularly during the period Rajkumar was a hostage of Veerappan -- faced trouble from a section of fans and anti-social elements. During the funeral procession, hooligans set fire to 16 buses, 30 cars and two-wheelers and two petrol stations. It is the responsibility of the government to compensate those who have lost their property in the riot.

Many genuine admirers of Rajkumar, including some who had worked with him in his 45-year-long career in the film industry, did not get a chance to pay their last respects to him. Even Rajkumar's family could not mourn in peace. The violence forced the family to complete the burial in a hurry, and Rajkumar's son Shivrajkumar went to the Kanteerava Studios late in the night to complete the religious rites. It's a pity, indeed.

Bangalore rioting wrapup

2006-04-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

These stories are on the news aggregator Bangalore Buzz:

Mayhem marks last rites of gentle star
Rajkumar laid to rest amidst widespread violence, eight deaths
The city was shut down during the funeral riots
Police were unprepared
Worst violence in 10 years; hotels attacked
The police became a target of frustrated mobs
Police fired entire tear gas arsenal

What a fucking mess! Meanwhile, Bangalore bloggers bemoaned the violence and were sure the city's reputation would be damaged. Yeah -- you think? Blogger Ambar asks, "Who are the rioters?" But on the day after, all seemed normal.

Bangalore rioting 5

2006-04-13T09:11:00.000-07:00

And here's a nice blog post on the chaos by blogger Bhaskar Mitra:

As the news pervaded into every single home over the wire through television sets and over FM Radio, Bangalore strangely found itself choking in an atmosphere permeated with smoke from burning tires and nightmarish visions of road side vandalisms. The city dressed itself in charred remains of burnt tires and glass pieces as it got ready to bid its very last farewell to the acting legend. To a person resident in this city only for the last 4 years this was not only beyond comprehension but outright criminal. Petrol pumps were set on fire and public transports stoned to stagnancy. All stores shuttered down and people ran home "shit-scared" in the middle of the afternoon. I saw no remorse in most of the participants who seemingly had found just another excuse for open drunken revelry on the streets to feed their ever ravenous hunger for sadistic destruction of public property.

Read more at his great post. And the interesting comments suggest many residents of Bangalore are embarrassed by the rioting.

Bangalore rioting 4

2006-04-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

The Deccan Herald writes:

When law and order, too, died

Deccan Herald

Moments after the news of the death of Rajkumar spread, mobs went on the rampage damaging public property, setting fire to buses, cars and other vehicles. Frenzied fans set fire to a petrol bunk near Hudson Circle and torched at least a hundred vehicles, including private and state transport buses in different parts of the City, while scores of vehicles were damaged in the stone-throwing.

Police lobbed tear-gas shells and wielded the lathis to bring the situation under control but with little success even at midnight.

According to police, mobs set fire to six four-wheelers, including two buses, near KR Circle and a bus near Krishi Bhavan. Seven vehicles, including two police vehicles, were set ablaze on Sankey Road. Vandals torched a state car right in front of the Vidhana Soudha and a vehicle in front of the GPO on Ambedkar Road. There were reports of people setting fire to vehicles near Pallavi Theatre. A portion of a consumer fair on Palace Grounds was also torched, the police said.

There were a number of incidents of stone-throwing and burning of tyres on roads. It was an “undeclared bundh” in many areas, as shops and business establishments downed their shutters. The city wore a deserted look by 6 pm. Magadi Road, Kamakshipalya, Vijayanagar, Rajajinagar, Subramanya Nagar, Malleswaram, Srirampuram, Mahalakshmipuram and the City Market were some of the areas which bore the brunt of lawlessness. Violence later spread to areas such as Hudson Circle, Bellary Road, Sampangiram Nagar, Richmond Circle, Ambedkar Veedhi and Basa-veswara Circle. A car was set on fire in Attiguppe, while a bus plying on Uttarahalli Main Road was set ablaze near Gowdanapalya.

The BMTC was forced to withdraw its Volvo services by afternoon and other buses too stopped plying by early evening. As many as 27 BMTC and 18 KSRTC buses, including a Volvo, were damaged. Mobs tried to set fire to two buses on Magadi Road and Bellary Road.

However, police intervened and prevented any untoward incident.

More than 20 platoons of KSRP and 15 platoons of the City Armed Reserve, two platoons of Rapid Action Force have been deployed in the City.

A South Western Railway official said train services were unaffected on Wednesday. The services are not likely to be affected on Thursday.

Bangalore rioting 3

2006-04-13T08:25:00.000-07:00

DailyIndia.com writes:

One killed as Bangalore logs out to mourn Rajkumar(LEAD)

By Indo Asian News Service

Bangalore, April 13 (IANS) One person was killed in police firing Thursday as anguished crowds mourning the death of Kannada thespian Rajkumar swarmed the city that came to a grinding halt with all establishments, including hundreds of IT firms, shutting down as a mark of respect.

The police firing took place near the Kanteerva stadium where the body of Kannada thespian Rajkumar was kept for people to pay homage, a top police official said.

'One of the fans, Muniraju, received bullet injuries when the police fired in self-defence after they were attacked by an angry mob with a hail of stones. The victim succumbed to injuries on way to hospital,' Additional Commissioner of Police Gopla Hosur told IANS over the phone.

Police had a tough time controlling the crowds that had gathered from across at the stadium since morning for a glimpse of their celluloid hero.

Explaining what had happened, a senior police official said: 'Though elaborate arrangements were made for people to pay homage to Rajkumar inside the stadium, hundreds of fans grew restless when their turn did not come despite waiting outside for hours.

'As time was running out for the cortege to be taken in a procession for last rites, impatient fans gate crashed into the stadium by attacking the police with stones and sticks.'

The police resorted to firing to regulate the crowds and the state reserve police and Rapid Action Force were deployed in and around the stadium.

With great difficulty, the police managed to allow Rajkumar's family to take out the glass cortege, mounted on a flower-bedecked van, from the stadium in a 15 km procession for the last rites with state honours and 21-gun salute.

The crowds at the stadium comprised young and old, women and children. Many sobbed and chanted 'Rajkumar jai' and 'Annavaru amar rahe' (Longlive Rajkumar).

According to a police official, over 100,000 fans joined the procession that meandered through the city on its last journey for the state funeral.

There were other incidents of violence with torching of buses and sporadic attacks on policemen near the Kanteerva sports stadium.

The corporate world and the government shut down.

While 1,500 IT and BPO firms, including global software majors like Infosys and Wipro, shut for the day, the Karnataka government declared a two-day mourning for the superstar and ordered closure of offices, courts, banks, business establishments, hotels and movie theatres.

Some of the major call centres, however, were working to provide essential services to their global customers on 24x7 basis.

Big-ticket companies like Infosys and Wipro directed their employees to stay put at home and avoid commuting to their workplace in the electronics city on the outskirts of Bangalore in the absence of public transport and an undeclared shutdown.

'As the state government has declared a two-day official mourning Wednesday, we have advised our employees to stay away from work Thursday and report to duty Friday. We intend to make up for the day's loss of work by asking the employees to work either this or next Saturday,' an Infosys official told IANS.

Besides IT and biotech firms, hundreds of manufacturing and allied industries across verticals were also closed as a mark of respect to the legendary matinee idol.

In the wake of sporadic violence, arson and stone-throwing incidents since Wednesday evening, bus services across the city were withdrawn. Even taxis and three-wheeler autos stayed away, leaving the streets deserted on an otherwise working day.

The bustling metropolis turned into a ghost town as even people with private transport decided to stay indoors.

Cable operators across the city blocked national entertainment channels to mourn the actor's death.

Bangalore rioting 2

2006-04-13T08:12:00.000-07:00

A second day of rioting today caused many foreign and locally-owned companies to close their doors. The Register says HP and McAfee shut down; Microsoft's building was the target of stone-throwers. Bloomberg said:

PrintPrint
Bangalore Shuts Down, Mourning Death of South Indian Actor

April 13 (Bloomberg) -- India's technology hub of Bangalore came to a standstill as stores, restaurants and companies such as Infosys Technologies Ltd. closed to avoid attacks by mourners from around the province gathering for actor Rajkumar's funeral.

Rajkumar, known to fans as "Aannavru" or elder brother, died yesterday at the age of 76, following a cardiac arrest, according to the NDTV television channel. He had been awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke and Padma Bhushan prizes by the federal government for contributions made during a 45-year career that included more than 200 Kannada-language films.

Fans yesterday burned tires, overturned vehicles and destroyed the glass fronts of buildings, including a Microsoft Corp. office near the actor's home, as they demanded that Rajkumar be posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. Infosys, India's second-largest software exporter, and smaller rival Wipro Ltd. joined the local government in declaring a holiday today.

Karnataka province's Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy and the late actor's wife Parvathamma, a film producer, today made a joint televised appeal to fans to maintain peace in the city to avoid dishonoring the late actor's name. The government is organizing Rajkumar's cremation at a one-acre site at Kanteerava Studios in the city this afternoon, following which a memorial will be built, they said.

Additional police officers were deployed throughout Bangalore yesterday as news of the actor's death spread. Stores and offices shut down early and sought to avoid becoming targets of attack by prominently displaying Rajkumar's posters and red and yellow flags carried by his supporters.

Kidnapping

Rajkumar's kidnapping by sandalwood smuggler Veerappan, an ethnic Tamil, in 2000 led to statewide riots and clashes with migrants from the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu until his release about 100 days later.

Bharatiya Janata Party leader L.K. Advani yesterday canceled his proposed trip to Karnataka following Rajkumar's death, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

Rajkumar, born Mutturaju Singanalluru Puttaswamayya, is survived by his wife, daughter and three sons. A school-dropout, he had been awarded an honorary doctorate by Mysore University.

Indian cinema has lost a distinguished actor and a versatile personality, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh yesterday said in a statement e-mailed by the government.

Rajkumar demonstrated his commitment to the local Kannada language and sacrificed opportunities to broaden his appeal and gain fame elsewhere in the country by refusing to act in other languages, Kumaraswamy said yesterday in a televised interview.

The Bharat Ratna that Rajkumar's fans have been demanding is awarded for exceptional service toward advancement of art, literature and science and public service of the highest order, according to the annual report of India's ministry of home affairs. It has been conferred on 40 people since it was instituted in 1954 and was last awarded in 2001.

From Bangalore Buzz, this explanation for the disturbances after the death of locally revered film actor Rajkumar:

As the thespian's fans went berserk across Bangalore, chief minister H D Kumaraswamy went on air on all channels appealing to the public to maintain peace. "Don't give in to any emotional turmoil or take hasty decisions. As a fan of Rajkumar, I appeal to you fellow fans not to bring a bad name to him," he said.

What triggered off trouble was the delay in deciding where the body should be kept for public viewing. Kumaraswamy said the initial venue was Palace Grounds, but this was set aside as "it is hard to control crowds there."

I asked a co-worker who is a Bangalore native, and his explanation went something like this: "Rajkumar had the ability to rally his fans for any cause, and over the years he used this power to rally people for one cause or another. So don't believe he was 'only an actor.'" This, he implied, would be like saying Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was "only a clergyman."

Bangalore rioting 1

2006-04-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Kumar.html

Indian Actor Raj Kumar Dies, Fans Riot

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 12, 2006

Filed at 12:54 p.m. ET

BANGALORE, India (AP) -- Raj Kumar, a onetime child actor who became one of south India's most beloved movie stars and later was kidnapped by a notorious bandit, died Wednesday at age 77.

He died in a Bangalore hospital of cardiac arrest, Dr. Ramana Rao told the Press Trust of India news agency.

Kumar, whose name was also spelled Rajkumar, appeared in more than 200 Kannada-language films in five decades, with millions of fiercely devoted fans. While he largely gave up acting in the mid-1990s, he remained one of the region's best-loved figures.

Hundreds of distraught fans rioted in Bangalore when police prevented them from forcing their way into the late actor's home, New Delhi Television reported.

Police used bamboo canes to drive away angry fans who shattered the windows of several buses and set a half-dozen cars and motorcycles on fire.

The actor's body was later moved to a large public park in the heart of the city to allow fans to pay their last respects. The regional government in southern India has decided to give Kumar a state funeral, according to Press Trust of India.

Kumar appeared in action films, mythological sagas and romance movies in which he was the star attraction.

Although he played rugged, masculine heroes who triumphed over scheming villains in many of his movies, he also was known for never having smoked cigarettes on screen, or never playing a drunkard after his early days.

He was in the news again in 2000 when he was kidnapped by Veerappan, a famed bandit who had spent decades eluding police in the forests of south India. Kumar was freed by Veerappan after 109 days living in the forests with his gang. Local reports said a large ransom was paid, although Kumar denied that.

Kumar's first glimpse into the world of acting was as a child, when he accompanied his father, an actor who performed in plays in small Indian villages.

Kumar soon dropped out of school to act on the stage and later in the movies.

He won more than 20 national and state awards for his contribution to Indian cinema. His fans called him "Annavaru" meaning "respected elder brother" in the Kannada language.

Movie reviews often told of audiences in cinema halls booing villains who tried to pick fights with him on the big screen. Fans were known to worship his image and pray that his films would be successful at the box office.

He also was a singer whose range extended from dance numbers to classical and devotional songs.

After his retirement, Kumar continued to work behind the scenes as a producer.

Kumar's three sons -- Shivraj, Raghavendra and Puneet -- all became successful actors.

Here is a relatively composed tribute to the actor, whom people seem to grant the honorific "Dr" for no reason I can see.

OMFG

2006-04-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

Got this email this morning from the manager of our Bangalore office:

Hi All,

Dr Rajkumar, one of the well known personality in Karnataka expired today noon.
Whole Bangalore is closed today and tomorrow in the view of riots happening.

We will try our best to come into office tomorrow.
In case emergency please try to reach our contact numbers.

Rioting? The guy is an actor, for Chrissakes.

'A general sloshy look'

2006-04-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

From the Deccan Herald, posted at Bangalore Buzz (It seems to be an op-ed or opinion piece, not a hard news piece, but still):

Cleanliness begins and ends at home

Deccan Herald

Cleanliness, like charity, begins at home. However, in India, cleanliness appears to get restricted to the four walls of a home. Everything else is public or government property, so why bother about keeping them clean is an attitude one comes across often.

Take the case of the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) and Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) bus stands in the heart of the City which this reporter visited.

Paan-stained walls, blotches of red all over, paper and plastic littered around, smelly corners and dirty overbridge are a common sight. The first reaction of a visitor can only be: Ugh! Unless the visitor's senses are already accustomed to such sights or he or she has seen something worse.

It appears that it is only minutes after the bus stands are cleaned that they look neat and approachable. As the day progresses, these places accumulate garbage and the toilets raise a literal stink!

Walk down from the BMTC bus stand into the KSRTC bus stand over the connecting overbridge and it is the stink of the toilet that welcomes you as you descend. Broken toilet doors, absence of buckets or flush tanks, defunct wash basins and a general sloshy look characterise some of the toilets.

Despite paying to use the toilets, visitors seem to care little about leaving it clean for use by the next person. At times, the very concept of pay and use appears to be the deterrent. Compounding the fact is the collection of Rs 2 instead of Rs 1 as entry fee at the public toilets and the presence of just four toilets each for men and women at a bus station where the movement of people ranges over one lakh.

Besides the use of toilets, the other bother is the habit of people spitting anywhere and everywhere.

So much so that a less alert walker may very well face the disgusting situation of someone spitting right on him or her. "For a person who is keen on cleanliness and hygiene, these bus stands would be a real no-no. Such people would want to keep away from the walls, the toilets and even the seats at the bus stands," says Aruna, a software engineer, who commutes everyday from the BMTC bus stand.

'A steam-bath like environment'

2006-04-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

From Lonely Planet's site:

When the monsoon finally arrives the rain comes in steadily, generally starting around 1 June in the extreme south and sweeping north to cover the whole country by early July. The main monsoon comes from the southwest, but the southeast coast (and southern Kerala) is largely affected by the short and surprisingly wet northeast monsoon, which brings rain from around October to early December.

Things don't really cool down: at first hot, dry and dusty weather is simply replaced by hot, humid and muddy conditions. It doesn't rain all day, but it rains every day. Followed by the sun this creates a fatiguing steam bath-like environment.

That's it, I'm definitely taking one of those little hand-held fans.

Gee, I can't wait

2006-04-10T10:21:00.000-07:00

I found out last week that my company will send me to Bangalore for ten days in July.

Sounds like fun:

Now, power cuts scar 'Brand Bangalore'

Financial Express, 10 April 2006

BANGALORE: Brand Bangalore, plagued by notorious traffic snarls and pot-holed roads, has added one more feather to its infamous cap — frequent power outages. With power demand peaking on the back of mushrooming new companies and surging population, the Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation Ltd (KPTCL) has started feeling the heat this summer like never before.

Power requirement in the Bangalore circle is growing at a rapid pace....

Justifying power cuts, KPTCL sources said the failure of major central and state power generating stations in the southern grid had plunged all southern states, including Karnataka, into crisis. The state is facing shortage of nearly 18 million units a day. However, official sources said KPTCL had floated tenders for generation of additional 200 mw in March for the summer months, but had received no response. The said proposal was too short-term for private power generating companies. Hence, no one has shown interest, sources disclosed.