Mega crowd in Mall

Here is the photo that I took on 25th of December, 2007, in Forum Mall in Bangalore. It was so crowded that one could not walk.

Today's morning commute

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=lm1kPwGg8ac]

Yesterday night it rained all night. So morning commute was full of detours and water logged roads. See for yourself.

How does a Tech MNC catch mice

The first surprise is that the MNC has its facility completely infested with MICE. The second surprise is that they seem to be using a home built mouse-trap. I would think they would be using some high-tech solution to get rid of mice.

Bizzare traffic in Bangalore

You can never guess the direction of traffic.

Mother of all traffic jams

I generally try to get to office very early in the morning to avoid traffic jams. But it seems the big bad world has figured out my plan. See this traffic jam at 7AM.

Is organized retail really good thing?

I don't think so. See the really bad quality of potatoes in Big Bazaar on old madras road in Bangalore. If you can't really get decent potatoes, then who needs shopping experience.

Forum mall launches free Wi-Fi

Forum mall in Bangalore (Bengaluru), India has launched free Wi-Fi. I tried to access it with my N95, it did not work. May be I need some setup.

Coffee in south india

I am not a coffee drinker. But if I am in a South Indian restaurant, I prefer coffee to tea because I have always found the quality of coffee to be better than the quality of team. Another thing that has always fascinated me is the way coffee is served in any South Indian restaurant. See the picture. It was taken in restaurant called South Indies, Indiranagar, Bangalore. The tumbler and the bowl. What is really fascinating that you get this combination in different sizes but the volume of coffee in the tumbler is always exactly same as the volume of coffee in bowl. So if you get coffee served in this combination and you can fearlessly pour whole coffee from tumbler into the bowl. It won't spill.

Deserted forum mall

Here is the forum mall in Bangalore at 11:50 PM on a Sunday. You won't find space to walk at any other time.

Decline of a restaurant

There used to be this great eating place called Ramana's on Cunningham road on Bangalore. I always liked it very much and quality and taste of food there used to phenomenal.

I used to visit them regularly and then for last six months or so I did not get a chance to go to that part of town. Yesterday I again visited them and to my dismay, the quality of food was really poor to average. It was really sad to see another good restaurant go down the path of so many other in Bangalore.

I don't understand why that happens, every restaurant eventually degenerates itself into a shanthi sagar. May be it is the oft-repeated business model of every software company trying to degenerate itself into an sweat shop.

Anyway, one less place to choose from if you just want good food and nothing fancy.

A company called Riya

So I am as usual surfing the net and I come across this interesting headlines from the times of India.

Wages killing Bangalore BPOs?

Now for most part I don't really give much credibility to what TOI writes but this one had this reference so I thought I should read.

In a blog posting, company's chief executive Munjal Shah, complained, â??Bangalore wages have just been growing like crazy. To give you an example, there is an employee of ours who took the first five years of his career to get from 1 per cent to 10 per cent of his equivalent US counterpart.

"He then jumped from 10 per cent to 20 per cent of his US counterpart in the next 1 year. During his time with us (less than two years) he jumped to 55 per cent of the US wage. In the next few months we would have had to move him to 75 per cent just to 'keep him at market."

I got interested in this because nobody ever offered me this kind of money. So I though let's search for this guy's blog which I found here.
Now the latest post in this blog talks about the fact that he closed his company's India operations and he let one guy come over to US after firing everybody in India and that guy is really grateful to him.

Dhiraj impressed the heck out of both of us. His dedication and attention to detail is amazing. He once drove to our IT guyâ??s house in Bangalore (who was not being super responsive), brought his laptop and made him fix something on the spot. Dhiraj is willing to call anyone in the middle of the night (including me and Azhar) to fix a bug if it is live on the site and critical.

As Azhar and I were making the list of people who should come to the US, we knew we needed Dhiraj. We knew he was someone we wanted by our side. He had earned it as much as anyone and we felt good to be able to give him the opportunity.

I remember the look on his face when we told him about the opportunity to come to the US. He looked like he was going to cry tears of happiness. He later told us that if he comes, he will be the first one from his village to every go to the US.

Now that sounded like non-sense. I was the first guy from my village to go to US I did not cry tears of happiness, my village is in UP which comes very close to Bihar in whatever way Mr. Munjal has mentioned it. Anyway this was no proof of the original TOI story, so I further in his blog and found this older post.

So the TOI story was right, not really BPO but we can't expect TOI to differentiate between a search engine and a BPO just like WSJ can't figure out that iPhone is not the first phone with a touch screen.

So I thought about the salaries quoted by him. I work for an MNC, have worked for last 13 years in India, in US and hired lots of people, interacted with hiring managers from other companies and for most part here is what I think salaries are in India.

• Freshers get paid anywhere between Rs. 250,000 to Rs. 600,000. Only really few are picked up by companies like google at salaries beyond this range. That is more like between USD 6250 to USD 15,000.


• Most of the people with 5-6 years of experience would earn between Rs. 500,000 to Rs. 900,000. i.e. more like USD 12,500 to USD 22,500.


• People with 10 years of experience (if they are lucky) actually get paid above Rs. 20,00,000 i.e. USD 50,000.

Now I am not sure where this company was hiring its people from. Based on my knowledge of the industry, this looks like either they were running really inefficient operations or just got scammed by a bunch of high profile engineers. What really ticked me off what this comment by Mr. Munjal on his own post.

At the end of the day is it about productivity vs. costs. The wages of the engineers in Bangalore can rise all the way to the US level so long as the productivity is equal. Even if we assume that an top guy here in Bangalore has the skill and intelligence as the US, he still maybe less effective for several reasons:

His infrastructure is less reliable. I was just hearing from one the guys on our team (who is moving to the US) that he sometimes gets up early to work on stuff while he is fresh. Frequently, however, his power goes out and then he has to come into the office (where more people are likely to bother him).

He will lose more time in transportation - horrible traffic and no parking which eat up more hours of the day than they do in the US. Even his home broadband connection is slower and unreliable - impacting his productivity there.

These external factors even include things like food. Each month at least 1-3 people call in sick for food sickness or for a Bandh (rioting in the streets). This rarely happens in the US.

Over time these things start to add up.

Munjal

In last 12 years in Bangalore i have seen probably 10 cases of rioting or bandh. That is more like 10 days of lost work in last 12 years and most of the software companies anyway make you work on a weekend to compensate for that. And the comment about food, he pays his employees salaries that are 75% of US salaries and they can't even afford decent food. He must be out of his mind.

For me personally this might be the end of an era. I spent six month a year in 2002 and 2003 in Bangalore. I loved being here and almost bought a house. I have some very fond memories of brunch at the Leela Palace on Sundays and partying all night at Spinn. I dont' know how much I'll continue to be in Banglore now, but it was a great part of my life for the last 4-5 years.

I was one of the biggest, India advocates you've ever met (I still am) but it is clear the primary business drivers of Bangalore are changing and with it the city must change.

Now probably his employees were calling in sick because they were having party at leela palace all night or something else but the fact is with people like Mr. Munjal Shah as advocates of India, I don't think we need enemys.

I can not attach any motivation to why Mr. Munjal Shah is doing what he is doing or writing what he is writing but I know for a fact that he is just exaggerating the facts or just does not know the facts.

Enough of a rant. I should have kept quite.

Bluetooth in malls

Here is an interesting idea, forum mall in Bangalore claims that if you turn on your phone bluetooth while in their mall, they will push interesting deals on your phone as png files. I did turn on my bluetooth and set it to discovery mode for around 5 minutes, I did not get anything, but that may be just timing.

Using GPS in India

I always wondered why there are no navigation services in India. Probably there are not enough customers. Finally I have found one decent road navigation solution that can be used in many places in India. It uses underlying google maps. If one is interested, here is how you go about doing it.

Buy a phone that can do GPS, I have used a Nokia N95 for this.
Subscribe to a GPRS plan from operator. You only need to access the web from phone so a airtel-live type of plan would be sufficient. You do not need the capability to use the phone as a modem, those plans are more expensive.
Go to http://www.gmap-track.com and create an account for your self.
Using the phone download the MGMaps application and set it up based on the instructions provided.

Now run the app on the phone and make sure that you are able to connect. Before running the app you should make sure that you have GPS lock on the phone. On N95 you can use GPS data application and make sure it shows you lat and lon.

Once the app is running, it will show your position on the phone and as you move it would track you on the map. The google maps are pretty accurate and current for many cities and highways in India. For bangalore it even shows you oneway information. Your family can also track you on the web if you share your web username and password with them.

The icing on the cake is that if you have a car TV in your car, N95 has a video out that you can connect to the TV and see the navigation on a larger screen.

Comment if you need more information or your experiences with solution.