This city's made us crazy and we must get out...

So, here I come to this famed hub of technology in southern India. The weather couldn't be more different from the original Silicon Valley- the rains longer, the wind stronger and the nights colder out here.

What a welcome! A friend had to leave the city almost as soon as I arrive, tossing all our plans out the window. The universe does have a sick sense of humour.

The people-oh, the people! There are so many of them that I began replacing "crowds" with "herds" in all my speech.

These herds are so much alike- in shape, size, packaging, labelling, tagging and what not. The whole sight and sound of 'em is so alike that not a day goes by without the song "Little boxes" ringing in my ears.

And all these people choose the exact same schedule to travel to and from work- the exact same two hours each in the mornings and the evenings. Either they have a masochistic love for spending several hours a day stuck in traffic or they have that logic part of their brains fried out from all the coding.

The jargon- uselessly stupid and stupidly useless. Everyone use it but no one knows what it actually means. I'm talking about the bandwidth of using the horizon to deliver perfect excellence across the scope... Sigh!
I'm a huge fan of social experiments; I like love sitting in a quiet corner and watching people act crazy. But lately, the samples of my social experiments have turned out to be so homogeneous that it's a huge waste of effort even trying to experiment here.

My most comfortable and frequent hangouts used to be coffee places and music lounges. This city has plenty of those, but none with the peace and quiet that attracted me to those hangouts in the first place. Conversations turn into yells and screams, cappuccinos are more like crap-uccinos. You know how good the DJ is when he plays an Indian remix of (Coldplay's) Paradise.


I wanted to write about the rude auto-wallahs, the fleecing store keepers, the blood-sucking public transport system and the trouble of finding a seat at office and a flat near the workplace. But here comes a traffic jam and it's time for my power nap- these days I get longer naps stuck in traffic than I ever could sneak at my desk...

PS. Coldplay and Maroon5, I'm solemnly sorry!
Location: Bangalore, Karnataka, India

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