INDIA-----> Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai!

On the 23rd of December I met my brother at Bangalore International Airport and we took a rickshaw into what he described as a "Where’s Waldo without the Waldo". We spent a week in the bustle of Bangalore eating Idly Vada Sambar and Masala Dosia, checking out the massive IT parks, and letting Will finish up the last real work he would be doing in India. We were able to visit one of the smaller Tech parks with a friend of Will's and both found it to be a fascinating place. The park we visited was a huge complex with dozens of buildings, high security, lots of parking, and a variety of different businesses that employed around 20,000 people all within a walled area of less than 50 acres. We were told that some of the larger parks such as Electronics World employ over 100,000 people! These gigantic employment centers are an incredibly efficient way IT companies can share bandwidth, cost of land, generator capacity, parking, food, and security. After a nice Christmas we packed up and hopped a train to the costal city of Chennai.



In Chennai the first thing we did was head down to the beach and watch the chaos of almost a dozen cricket games being played in the middle of a sandy road. You couldn’t tell where one game began and the other ended. While cars drove through the mayhem, balls got hit into the highway or toward the ocean, and cheers went up. Throughout India I found myself wondering how a billion people with different religions, social statuses, and languages all managed to live so calmly in such chaos. If this country was full of the French or Americans everybody would be at each others throats. Even if the cricket pitcher was ready to make his running throw and a car honked a couple times the game was paused and the players would part until the car had driven on into the next game. After watching part of the day’s matches we walked down to the water front. As we neared the large numbers of fishing boats pulled up on the shore and what looked like government housing Will commented on how much a pile of crap looked like human feces. A few steps farther I confirmed that the piles around us had to be human and that about 100 yards ahead of us someone was adding to the problem. We turned around and carefully picked our way back to the cricket games. We were amazed that even the government housing wasn’t able to deal with the waste. In Chennai we also caught one of the most entertaining movies of my life. An Indian movie with guns, gangsters, bad acting, and at least five full length music videos worked into the plot. Unlike the silent American theaters the Indian theaters are filled with cheers and whistles as the good guys win or a beautiful girl comes on screen. After having a fun New Years we flew to one of the biggest cities in the world: Mumbai (Bombay).




Our goal for Mumbai was to buy a motorcycle and drive north. We spent four days dealing with or trying to avoid licenses, registrations, permits, and Indian bureaucracy to no avail. Suggestion: if you are going to try and buy a motorcycle try the rest of the world before Mumbai. After failing with the bike we felt we needed our 15 minutes of fame so we took up an offer to act in a Bollywood soap opera (You have to start somewhere). We were taken by taxi, train and rickshaw to the studio and acted all night as background westerners. After 10 hours of walking and dancing in the background we were ready to head back to the hotel and get paid. We were paid a humbling 500 Rupees (about a dollar and hour). While we were in Mumbai I was reading Shantaram: a tale of an Australian criminal escaping to Bombay, living in a slum and dealing with the Indian mafia. By telling his story Gregory David Roberts has created a masterpiece that all should read. On the 7th of January we left the smells, sounds, and overflowing trains of Mumbai and headed into the desert state of Rajasthan to pursue our dream of motorcycling.........

---

---