the Bengaluru blog

I had written a blog post about Staples, Marathahalli launch on this blog a while back. Well after that occassion, the store has now been opened in Garuda Mall, Margrath Road, and of late in Koramangala as well. I had a chance to visit the Koramangala staples store to check out on some stationery and on a few laptops, since its shopping season for laptops! I must say I was more impressed with this outlet than the Marathahalli one for some reason. Maybe its because of the number of people, or the varieties of things stored, or something else. The store looks huge, and is huge as well.

The number of things kept in the store is seriously going to give the creeps for smaller stationery stores to match upto staples! And if you are thinking the prices are unreasonably high, you might need to rethink. There are things that are affordable within Staples. From Files, to school products, to notebooks, to mobiles, to laptops, to label markers, to furniture to printers, to earphones, to vacuum cleaners to pens to erasers - you find everything here! I went in to check for laptops and their prices.

The real reason is tha I have an NEC Versa E600 laptop (anyone want to buy it at cheap price?), which has come of age. I bought it in 2003 and its now 5 years. The laptop still runs well with windows XP, I’ve increased the RAM to 780MB, the XP license is original, I’ve even managed to upgrade the CD-RW to a DVD-R, added a USB wireless dongle as well from SMC, and this has a 30 gig HDD. All said and done, I now want to have a laptop with everything inbuilt - webcam, mic, speakers, must run atleast windows xp, 2 GB RAM, Dual core processor, 160 GB hard drive, USB 2.0 ports, SVideo port, Wifi 802.11n , etc. Acer and Compaq fit my bill for these necessities now and I found these two to be interesting in Staples. However being unable to decide at the moment, I decided to come out of Staples with just some stationery purchases for the moment.

I did find an interesting pen however, which in essence echoes the proverb "The pen is mightier than the sword ! "

For those wishing to see some useful stuff now avaialble in India at the same quality as anywhere else abroad, head to Staples, Koramangala. You wont be disappointed. I have the telephone number for Staples Marathahalli for now : +91-80-6699-0608 and their website is at www.staplesfuture.com. If anyone can add the telephone number for Staples, Koramangala, I would be glad.

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The OASIS shopping center opened to public today the 30th of January 2008 in Koramangala. This perhaps kind of completes Koramangala into a fully transformed floating population hub as compared to the wild jungle it was exactly in 1983 when we first settled down here. Since 25 years, what a metamorphisis it has been! From a layout which had only one bus plying towards the city bus stand every three hours once to now being called the center of the city, its been quite a journey. So much so that the city’c center of gravity now has become Koramangala. Starting with cool parks, mundane post offices, one big school, missing bus services and being constantly harassed by small time RTO policemen in yesteryears, the locality has now seen a great transformation and amalgamation of different services including IT companies, ITES companies, call centers, petty shops, road side push cart shops, hundreds of Darshini’s, atleast two dozen good hotels, Pizza corners, hideouts, huts and what not, dhabas, multi cuisine hangouts, multiple petrol pumps, umpteen banks, arcades and shopping avenues, one 400 crore mall called the FORUM with multiple cinema screens, to tens of thousands of vehicles screaming at the top of your heads day in and out to hundreds of flights taking off on your roof everyday to spiralling rentals around the area - Koramangala has truly seen it all.

The Salarpuria owned OASIS mainly consists of the SPAR hypermarket (a full fledged shopping market), the LifeStyle store for all kinds of clothing accessories and POLYNATION - a one of a kind food court. Besides these there are software companies like NDS who also are put up there. And this building can accomodate many cars at its car parking facility at a time. Am I feeling lucky to reside here? Well until now no, but with the airport shifting out of here to Devanahalli, perhaps going forward in time, definitely yes! Thank you dad - I Owe it all to you!

So what are you waiting for? Visit the OASIS today !!

Technorati Tags: Life in Bengaluru, Koramangala, Bangalore, Bengaluru, Posh, Locality, BDA layout, Indiranagar, Inner ring road, Shopping mall, OASIS, Spar hypermarket, Polynation, PVR cinemas, Forum mall, Big bazaar, Sunday to monday, Banks, Petrol pumps, Nds, Software, Darshinis, Hotels, Hangouts, Coffee parlors, Pizza, Eatery