Bengaluru by Day: Part 1

In India, it's pronounced "Hay-chh P"

After arriving in Bengaluru (Bangalore) late last night, we woke up for a day of seeing the sights.  The city is smaller than Chennai and seems more organized, in terms of zoning.  Modern buildings stand next to others of the same design and age.  In contrast, the modern buildings in Chennai are adjacent to, ummm… less modern buildings and houses.   In Chennai one can see an office building or shopping center next to old, crammed storefronts and houses.  The difference is mainly due to the recent, rapid growth of Bengaluru, thanks to the presence of American and European information technology (IT) companies and outsourced support for other firms.  The list includes many recognizable names: (Dell, Hewlett Packard, eBay, Unisys, IBM, Honeywell, and Accenture) and some unrecognizable names like European software and telecommunications companies whose names I won't write because you won't recognize them.  OK, I forgot the names, but you still wouldn't have recognized them.

The first item on our itinerary was to have breakfast at the house of Rajan’s parents (Valli’s brother and sister-in-law).  They recently moved to Bengaluru and live in a very new condo complex.  Indeed the final floor is not yet complete of the building is not complete.  But we went up there anyway to take pictures.

On the roof.

On the unfinished top floor

After breakfast, we headed to the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum.  It’s the first time I’ve even seen an Archimedes’ Screw and the boys lined up to crank the handle.  This museum contained many interactive exhibits and the boys had fun climbing on and playing with things.  The exhibits are on three floors.  The theme of the first floor is the five simple machines: the lever, the wheel and axle, the incline plane, the pulley and the cold fusion reactor - just kidding, the screw.  OK, a physics purist may argue that the screw is just a spiral incline plane.  To that I say "Whatever, geek-o."

Eureka!

I should mention that we visited Bengaluru and (later) Mysore during the Independence Day weekend.  India became independent on August 15, 1947.  If you like the three-day weekend that we sometimes get on the Fourth of July, you'll love the four-day weekend in India.  The government declared the previous Friday to be a holiday.  They might as well, no-one would work anyway. Anyway, that meant that all the tourist attractions were crow-ded.  Indians don't care much for personal space, with 1.2 billion people they can't afford to, so there was much jostling in front of the exhibits.

After the museum, we had lunch.  Then we went to Cubbon Park, in the center of Bengaluru, where we ran afoul of the law (more on that in a later post).