the Bengaluru blog

Post 1995, koramangala slowly started picking up to being one of the favourite haunts of many an IT company. This is also rougly the timeframe when Electronics city was parallely contemplated and put into place. EC was a natural extended version of Koramangala itself. Those companies who could not afford the would-be-slowly-posh neighbourhood, had to think of EC as their next choice. EC brought about expanding Koramangala southwards towards madiwala. Another popular destination chosen by some famous software companies including Texas instruments, HP were Wind tunnel road, nearby ISRO and old airport, and this expanded Koramangala eastwards to bring out what is currently the Intermediate Ring road. the west and north were already bustling entries and exits to Koramangala. 

The next most important turning point for the locality was the Forum Mall. Businesses, apartments, paying guests, eateries, offices, everything mushroomed around Forum making 7th and 8th blocks most wanted. The 1st and 2nd blocks maintained their charm due to the rather famous Raheja Residency and a few other apartments around the place. Today it serves as an important link to outer ring road, HSR Layout, and madiwala for thousands of people. What were once huge (120×80, 120×120) residences in 3rd and 4th blocks, are now serviced homes, and/or costly restaurants which lend themselves rather well to the decor of the entire locality. With peaceful surroundings, they make the best spots to be in for visitors from both within and outside the country.  5th and 6th blocks were mostly middle class who were typically from the public sector companies and at best these are now influenced by the 80' road running through 6th block, and the two 60' roads binding 5th blocks in a deadly business grip !!

The 80' road itself has proved a lifeline for the esrtwhile lakebeds of National Games village, and ST bed, to become jam packed with apartments offering paying guest options and business conference rooms who make hay even when the sun won't shine. Of course this kind of development also presents tens of thousands of employment opportunities to a wide variety of people who naturally then become the floating population of the place. This means they also use their vehicle to criss cross the locality which is already congested with some serious traffic. Every single IT company has a bus running through this place during peak hours and this only adds to the chaos. An area which starts off its calm mornings by 6am turns into a traffic nightmare by 8am. Same holds good during the evenings. The residential tag of Koramangala is slowly and steadily reaching its logical end. So much that people are unmindful that them causing noise pollution and vehicular disturbance would harm the peace and tranquility enjoyed by erstwhile residents.

Pubs and shops have only added to the chaos which brings about scores of boys and girls who occupy every park bench everyday bunking their daily routines denying residents a chance to enjoy anything around. Paying guest accomodation only means vehicular disturbance beyond the acceptable night hours. Call centre mania is no less glorified as well here. And with so many people for the 12 hours in a day and their palates to satisfy, have only meant literally hundreds of restaurants mushroom on every street possible – the shanti sagars, the sukh sagars, the amritsars, the delhi's, the paratas, the andhra messes, the kerala food joints, why only indian, even all the way upto chinese, korean, american and even europians have invaded the place lapping up every piece and parcel of real estate available. There are no less than about 200+ restaurants dotting the locality making it a logistical nightmare. 

Without proper infrastructure plans, without proper connectivity which was faster, safer and more effecient, Koramangala has silently suffered through the changes in times. What I enjoyed in terms of my schooling, my friends' circle, my games sessions, and the tranquility around during my youth are things which I cannot provide for my children at this stage. The evolving change Koramangala has brought about has forced even a few of the hardcore Koramangalites who have known the localities' roots to look out for other options. There can be hundreds of good things to enjoy nearby but all that becomes meaningless if one cannot get one nights' worth of sound sleep at the end of it.

It is at this juncture that I take a deep bow to salute and respect a locality that has meant so much to me and my childhood, a locality that has gained so much respect for globalization and its cosmopolitan nature, a place whose great things will forever be etched in the minds of its original residents. The years spent in the locality Koramangala originally was are something no one in future can understand, and no one in the past can forget. This is the true phenomenon I was part of and will never forget. Goodbye Koramangala. Goodbye forever.

Once upon a time touch screen phones were considered luxury. If they had 2MP cameras, they were worshipped, and if they possessed Wi-Fi, it was not meant for the middle class. All that is now passe. With the entry of the BIG 3 super hit phones, the Indian market just heated up to get exciting. So who are these three and what’s on offer? Find out more below.

Image source: www.gsmarena.com

Image sources: www.boygeniusreport.com  , http://img.xataka.com

The last one month has seen some hot launches in the smartphone market from none other than Research in Motion (RIM – Blackberry), Motorola, and Apple. Each has unleashed a turf war with their best selling products – the Storm 2 Blackberry touch, the Milestone, and the 3GS iPhone. A brief comparison of the specs are as below:

If we compare the Moto Milestone, and apple iPhone 3gs briefly with Blackberry Storm 2 9520, these are the features available:

Features	Milestone	Storm 2	iPhone 3GS
Price	28,500	31,000	35,500
3g Networks	2	1	3
Capacitive touchscreen	Yes	Yes	Yes
Resolution	480×854 !!	360×480	320×480
Sensors	Yes	No proximity sensor	Yes
Internal memory	256MB	2GB !!	256 MB
3g Speed	Upto 10.2 Mbps !!	7.2 Mbps	7.2 Mbps
Camera	5 MP !!	3.2 MP	3.2 MP
Video	24 fps	24 fps	30 fps !!
Flash	Dual LED !!	LED	None
Processor	600 Mhz, lesser graphics	528 Mhz	600 Mhz, better graphics !!
GPS with maps	Yes	Yes	Yes
Battery	1400 mAh	1400 mAh	1200 mAh

From this comparison you can see that for the price point under question the best value for money phone would  most naturally be the Moto Milestone. However, more of everything does not mean a better phone.

• For example if you look at the table, graphics is much better in iPhone which means their user interface will needless to say be the best among the three.
• Also if you look at video recording, the iPhone surpasses its competition by a good 5fps more.
• So also with the bands supported for 3G. In this department the blackberry is the worst.
• Again if you see the camera, the Moto beats competition hands down with 5 mega pixels with dual LED flash and the apple is not even worth talking about

So which one must you consider? Well frankly, for me, these are my opinions considering I have or will be using atleast two among the three titans of smartphones, the storm and the 3GS.

• When it comes to price the Milestone from  Motorola kicks everyone else out
• When it comes to navigation and usability for all people of the house, the apple iPhone wins by a big margin. One should also not forget the 1,50,000 applications that the appStore has for users compared to Google and Blackberry
• For pure business applications, the Motorola milestone has the potential to keep people happy for a long time, perhaps until Google itself releases its 1GHz Nexus One (which it does not intend to in India)
• One another important thing is that while Apple iPhone 3GS in India is locked to Airtel or Vodafone, the Motorola Milestone and Blackberry Storm 2 will be available unlocked for any operator in the country which is a huge plus point at that price.
• With good 3g data services support from BSNL and the impending 3G spectrum auctions, all other private operators will shortly follow with their 3G services, all these phones are set to harness the power of 3G from various operators to provide video calling and other such facilities. These phones support 3G quite well as expected and this is a good feature in all phones in comparison
• All these phones have 3.5mm standard headset jack making them all multimedia ready by nature of design
• All these phones are GPS enabled with the Moto supporting free turn by turn navigation which is a big boon to finding your way in a lost place.
• If you are the person who likes physical qwerty keypad, Moto is for you, if you like both touch and press (surepress) keypad, the storm is for you and if you like the touch only keypad, iPhone is for you. I am used to touch typing, so both Storm and iPhone 3gs appeal to me more than the physical QWERTY of Moto.
• Google has only 30000 applications, compared to Apple’s 1,50,000 which is a huge marketing plus for Apple. Blackberry apps are not worth mentioning at all frankly

For any comparison there have to be negatives, so here they are:

• Though the Moto Milestone sports 5MP camera, there is no 30fps video recording which is a shame
• The RAM in both Moto and Apple is only 256 as compared to 2GB in Blackberry. This is a vast difference
• None of the handsets support dual camera (front and back facing) which are most necessary for video calls, and this is a shame for the price paid.
• Limited support for each of these handsets in terms of warranty repairs and the limited reach to the customers is slightly disheartening.
• Blackberry and Apple have no clear maps usage policy which makes it difficult for a normal user
• Locking to operator is going to hurt Apple’s fortunes compared to the other two competitors
• Non removable battery is bad for Apple whereas not for the other two since they also sport more powerful batteries

In SUMMARY, if you love core technology, want huge features for low price, with Google’s famed Android 2.1 OS, look no further than the Motorola Milestone. If you are the business conscious user who have been a fan of RIM and their products and appreciate their push email technology and still need other commonly found features, then the Storm 2 is a refreshing change from RIM with their touch based screen and surepress typing technology. The large memory, and slick business features will appeal the business community for sure. If you want ease of use, large amount of apps to chose from, and don’t mind the extra cost, for what you get in return – the famed apple popularity, at the cost of some missing features, then the iPhone 3GS is for you.

Take your pick, for now mine is the iPhone 3GS since I feel Google has some catching up to do with Apple. As for blackberry, I enjoyed it as long as I had it, and would recommend it even though I don’t own it now.

Alright, we do understand that the BJP wants to do something useful in the city in the five years they have got, so as to come to power again. One must appreciate they are atleast receptive to what people’s need maybe, whether they are able to fulfill them or not.

So here goes, currently the city is being strategically screwed up in the name of development. And alas, one must bear with this infrastructure torture for some more time until either they run out of any more ideas, or until they come with something more ingenious and decide to undo what they did in the first place.

The entire museum road stretch is now screwed up and this is causing atleast an additional 10 minutes to cross up this stretch by car every morning.

I did think, perhaps its atleast easier to come back home via the Palace Road stretch, but thanks to the great Airtel Championship Trophy Cricket, the entire cubbon road, mg road and surrounding stretches are completely screwed up during evenings. Manual signal handling only means more delays, and I now reach home atleast half hour to one hour more than usual. I think seamlessness is still a far fetched goal for Bangalore to achieve. The thought of avoiding a drive inside the city and using the ring road was saner, until the government decided to put a spoke in many a wheel there too. Two new flyovers which must statistically be over in six months from now, are hogging everyone’s time as I found out the hard way round.

Took a bus from North Bangalore at 6:15pm and reached HSR layout at 8pm. Reached koramangala at 9:30pm. Need I speak more? Add to this the entire 27th Main in HSR now serves dust and dirt on your face at any time of the day, with haphazard parking here and there. Makes me wonder why people still dont realize that a good walk for shopping or eating upto 1km does make wonderful sense rather than zipping by your cars. People please stop driving your cars for such small distances. If you think you cannot walk even less than a kilometre, then you perhaps cant eat too much either! Think twice!!

A month of two of ridiculous driving timings, has taken the toll on my free time. Sometimes I think buying a smaller laptop might help me atleast blog more regularly as I can lug it around more than usual!

Its been a long while that I blogged, and it feels really strange to me that I have actually not blogged so far. So let me get ahead with today’s experience – dinner at Food Street. After a rather long day slogging on a weekend, and many missed chances of being at Food Street, I finally decided to check it out today.

Me and my friend reached Sajjan Rao Circle and expected something like a long street full of nice restaurants selling all varieties of food. Also knowing Karnataka I expected all these to be Darshini’s, or the fast food type of eateries. It was similar, but with one obvious difference – we had to eat the food ON the street! Nowhere to sit. In fact the food itself was being cooked ON the street. Now you get the point in the name dont you? – FOOD STREET.

The eateries are very small rooms or sometimes excuses for a room in terms of shape where things are prepared. Mostly the food is prepared right on the street and only raw materials occupy these so called odd shaped rooms. Business starts at about 6pm after sunset and gets brisk around 7:30. The atmosphere is charged up with youngsters and elders alike pouring onto food street. Steam fills the air from freshly prepared mouth watering Rice Rotis, Butter dosas and other items. Chats, juices, are everywhere. The vendors are more than courteous and show off their marketing skills extensively. Even the most disinterested person will finally succumb to the marketing skills exhibited by these vendors!

There are also stalls that sell north indian fare, such as Vada pavs, chats, and Gobi manchurians. Tucked away down the street is also the arya vaisya restaurant (correct me if i may be wrong!) where people buy snacks at all times of the evening.

Each shop feels like it belongs to a more bigger theme – food street! No shops lags behind another in what they sell with respect to time or quality or price. They work in unison to achieve the charged up atmosphere where crowds return each night for savouring some good food.

With just about a hundred bucks, my stomach was full. It was ages since I tasted such good food. It was an evening well spent chatting away with my friend and generally enjoying a cool evening with steamy food preparations! And for those of you who want to go shopping around don’t forget to visit VB Bakery at the end of Food Street. VB has been the dominant bakers since two decades in this area. The sheer stuff they have makes them a superlative bakery in Bangalore. And don’t forget to buy the delicacy they stand for even today – Dumroot – a pumpkin based sweet preparation that is sure to melt in your mouth!

If this article has triggered your taste buds to get more, sprint to Food Street after 6pm every evening. It will be an evening of a different kind and something that stays in your memory for a long while for the uniqueness of the concept.

There was a furore sometime back on using imported toys from China. These were meant to be unsafe for kids. NDTV had this report about these toys and how they have taken over the Indian market. What stumped me was the fact that even a 3 month baby teether had toxic levels of lead!

I am an avid buyer of Mee Mee products since I liked their products and the brand in particular. In one such instance in the Star Bazaar run by Tata group, I managed to bump into this water bottle.

I thought its not a toy as such, so it may not be harmful. Just turned it the other way and to my surprise found this statement!

It read “Carefully made in China for …. “ and I couldn’t hide the chuckle at the tactics adopted by plastic makers to still sell chinese stuff in our country. This was some sort of a practical joke which most often goes unnoticed! Well even if it doesn’t one cant do much about it due to an already existing disclaimer! Indians surely find ways of escaping even the toughest constraints don’t they?

Today I got some time to go out with my cousin to see the Nilgiris Cake and Consumer exhibition. So I set off to St.Joseph's Indian high school to have a glimpse of the same. Twenty bucks for car parking, thirty for the entry fee and we were directly straight into the biggest cake exhibit of all – the buckingham palace. I think the behaviour of people managing the place was next to audacious. They were herding the crowds like pigs, and pushing them more and more further, announcing that the cake exhibits must not be photographed. I have one question to you organizers, pardon me for that – but – WHAT THE FUCK? This is free india, and you are not allowing me into some military base or Vidhan Soudha, its just for heaven's sake a cake exhibition and that too a hot furnace. So why must I then not take pictures of a cake? I am not eating the cake am I?

Now this happens even at the airports where pictures are not allowed in India. May I ask why so? Are you flying stealth bombers in and out that I must not take pictures of the so called carriers? This kind of ridicuous provocation for paying thirty bucks of my money is unacceptable by any standards. You seem to be giving knee jerk reactions rather than planned thoughtfulness. And remember the cakes are for people to see and appreciate, which I shall come to discussing just further. You are not displaying something so sensitive and emotional that I must not take photos. And the foul language spoken by the security to visitors – again cheap and dumb. Agree you are under job pressure, but we are under recession and the last thing we need is YOU SHOUTING AT US. So having said that, I was pushed and shoved around until I reached the end of the cake exhibition, with so much gusto that it felt more horrible than the Tirupati Tirumala Devasthanams.

That said, there was the Buckingham palace (a rather simple structure to make out of cake in my opinion), and the new 7 wonders of the world. Note however that the enthusiasm shown in making the cakes is not as much as the last few years and is steadily on the decline. I had high hopes out of the colosseum but it turned out to be a damp squib. The fact that these are new 7 wonders might have made it difficult to design, but then atleast more intricate details could have been laid out. If you want to know more about the new seven wonders of the world, read here. The other cakes were nothing much to talk about. However the biggest gamble from the organizers side seemed to be the even larger consumer durables exhibition much like the society exhibition I had written about earlier. The usual magic stoves, the usual hose pipes, really quick water heaters (without any care for power consumption) and the vegetable processors (of which I too was a victim today) were all there in the exhibition. The unbreakable vegetable cutter just broke when I tried it at home and not there in the stall! So much for entrepreneurship!

This aside, more and more of plastics, furnitures, paintings, clothings, american diamond jewelry (dont get misled, I m just referring to fakes here), appliances, home loans (that one seemed odd), health foods, digestive mouth fresheners, lucky throw games, and a large variety of food stalls – they were all there. So by the time I came out I forgot the fact that this was meant to be a cake exhibition. Nilgiris, the business take over from your old owners if at all has happened, is really showing in this exhibition and the way it was conducted. I miss you – Original Nilgiris.

TO SEE ALL THE PHOTOS FROM THIS EXHIBITION CLICK HERE.

Technorati : 5 mast sailor ship, Chichen Itza Mexico, Christ Redeemer, Colosseum of Rome, Machu Picchu, Nilgiris, Petra, St.Joseph's Indian high school, The Great Wall, Tirupati Tirumala Devasthanams, bangalore, bengaluru, buckingham palace, cake exhibition, cakes, christ the redeemer, clock tower, clothes, consumer goods, exhibition, food, gas stoves, great wall of china, india, jewelry, kiddies island, machu pichu, mexico, new 7 wonders, pastries, pipes, pyramid, seven wonders, society, sports car, taj mahal, vidhana soudha

My wife was back from office early on Saturday (its been two decades since I believed others work on saturdays ) and asked me to come along to the Society collection exhibition in the indoor stadium at NGV. Her hopes of having a free entry was shortlived when the counter guys charged us 100 bucks to enter the place. Its advertised as india's biggest handicrafts exhibition, so you have to expect such nuisances as entry fees and the likes. I would like to call it Indias biggest exhibition in India's smallest enclosure Thats perhaps more fitting.

The exhbition did have good amount of fashion fabrics, paintings, knicknacks, all ladies fashion accessories, bathroom items, wooden furtniture and antiques, a lot of jewelry, and some interesting stuff which I ll talk about later. For now here are some snaps of the place

There were only two things that impressed me in this exhibition, one was the hose pipe that had innumerable amount of fittings with different threadings for fitting different taps, different spray types, easy portability – this costed 1900 and though I was very much inclined to buy it for my dad, I decided not to go for it right now (yes the recession bug has bitten me too ).

So then what was the other thing that impressed me: – an electromagnetic induction based gas stove based on Eddy currents. It had no heat, no shocks, no smoke, no fire principle. Awesome. Just to prove the point, the guy there put a 10-buck note inbetween the pan and the stove. And nothing happened to it even though the water in the pan was boiling and steaming. Just to cross check I even put my hand on the stove and nothing happened as promised!

The stove comes in different varieties and typically based on weight that be loaded onto it, 30kg, 20kg, 10kg, 5kg, etc. The prices varied between 3,500 bucks to 9000 bucks for a double stove. And there was another caveat. He would sell only to corporates or to those who had orders of three and above units. No single units except when booked at the exhibition. Having said that, I was not in the mood to buy, (recession!), so I took down their contact details and walked out of the place. I am leaving it here in case you are interested.

If you need the numbers, here they are:

Bilwaa marketing inc, 2334 6440/1, 99164 24880, 99866 22106, 99803 68612, & 99028 77075. Their address is 133, 11 cross, sampige road, malleshwaram, bangalore 03.

Finally to sum up on the exhibition: It had some good food stalls at the end much better than what I have seen before in the same stadium. But for paying 50 bucks, I ended up buying some earrings for my wife, if not anything costiler (again the recession ). My suggestion : if you really want to see the two items I mentioned by paying 50 bucks, go there, else go only if you want to seriously end up buying something. The entry cost is pretty exhorbidant and is in other terms called daylight robbery!

Technorati : 6th block, 80 feet road, bangalore, bengaluru, blog, current, eatables, eddy current, electromagnetic, exhibition, fire, gas stove, handicrafts exhibition, heat, indoor, induction, jewelry, koramangala, national games village, ngv, shock, shopping, smoke, snacks, society, stadium