Hello laptop, my old friend

This week we spent most of our time on computers. I’ve got deep red grooves on my wrist from using the trackpad on the (hot, metal) mac, instead of my external mouse. My contact with the outside world comes increasingly via Facebook, and the adventure novels tucked between the textbooks on Vikram’s shelves.

We thought about the lost city of Hampi, just to the north, but it’s unreachable after the region suffered its worst floods in decades. There are lots of ashrams – the city is famous for them- and via Soha we found someone willing to give us a tour. But that didn’t pan out either; editing took priority.

Still, as in our previous stops the people we’ve met have made up for the missed tourist opportunities. We met a former ambassador and his wife, who had tales of drinking with the Brezhnevs and being accidentally shelled by Saddam Hussein’s anti-aircraft guns. We got a tour of the town by another alumnus, a journalist almost exactly my age, who was very eloquent about some of the pressures created by being young and having an Oxford degree in India.

New skyscrapers: expect to see more of these

Bangalore has been the Silicon Valley of India since the 1980s, so we’ve been speaking to lots of people in the IT sector. Shrini asked us to guess how many workers HP alone has in the city; I underestimated by a factor of four*. Later, we met someone at AOL who left Britain for India because the opportunities for IT research are better. All those Oracle offices I used to see in Reading, from the window of the London train, are sales and consulting – the computer stuff is all based in the US and India. There are certainly call centres here, matching the UK cliche, but that’s a fraction of the activity going on.

China feels like the future and everyone there seems to know it. It’s harder to see India’s potential when jammed behind an autorickshaw in heavy traffic, but talking to people you realize the prospects for the place. We’re a pair of geeks but we were completely stumped by the projector system in the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, before Hannah delivered a talk there. That seemed to be a metaphor for something.

Amenities in Bangalore Airport

I’m not being completely honest about it being all work. Full disclosure – on the last day, in the last 45 minutes, I did manage some tourism. Along with Vikram’s father-in-law and daughter (up on her feet and feeling much better after her bout of fever), I went to the local temple – or rather, temple complex. I visited four different buildings, spread out across a road and including many statues to walk around, offer flowers to, or be splashed by water from. I was still baffled by the goings on, but ended up with a red tilaka on my forehead, which led to kindly looks by airport security. I think they get a lot of bumbling white guys finding themselves around here.

- Tom

* It employs 40,000. For comparison purposes, Oxford takes 26 computer science undergrads a year.

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