Working in Bangalore

Bangalore, India

16th December 2008

I spent the last ten days working for my company in India. We have offices in London and in Bangalore and the overwhelming majority of our staff are based in Bangalore.

My flight over was lovely. I flew on King Fisher which, according to the owner, is the only five-star airline in India. There were no stewards, only stewardesses and all of whom were tall, skinny and about my age. They had widescreen in-flight entertainment in every seat and the screens in business class looked to be about 17".

Going through immigration in India was straightforward. They didn't say a word and there was only one person in the queue ahead of me. Going through customs was something else. I needed to bring a shredder for work and the customs officers, though friendly, wanted to extort 1190 Rupees (about 17 pounds) for it.

I didn't have any cash on me so I asked if I could leave to get some, they let me out of the customs area and into the terminal. There the cash machine was broken but I could see my colleague waiting for me outside talking on his mobile. I couldn't understand why he didn't come into the airport so I walked out to go get the cash off him.

I didn't pay much attention to the armed guards at the door until I stepped through the doorway and they freaked out. The customs officer trailing me calmed them down and just said I didn't know any better. My colleague handed me the cash through the doorway and then, after being offered a desk and office materials to help calculate exactly how much they should take from me, I was free to go. Turns out at Bangalore's airport, no one is allowed in without a plane ticket and passport and no one is allowed out until they have stamps on documents from the various agencies in the airport.

As we walked from the terminal with our driver to the car there was a large group of Indian men following us and paying close attention to our driver. Turns out there was a taxi driver strike on at the airport and they weren't happy to see alternative service providers getting people to and from the airport. Our driver explained that he was our company's private driver and they left us alone.

Culture shock kicked in when I saw a family of five sharing a motorcycle on the road into Bangalore. But, as a key theme to this trip, things were much different from what I'm used to but not in any sort of negative way. Everything ended up being a pleasant surprise and a fascinating learning experience.

It was sunny and warm every single day I was in India and there was never a drop of rain. Every day was about 28C making this the warmest December I've ever experienced.

After dropping off my bags and washing up at the house, I went to go see all my fellow colleagues in our Bangalore office. Everyone was smiling and really friendly. It's great to work with such a genuine group of people. We share an office building with Google and Emirates and it was only about twenty minutes away from where I was staying.

In the evening, three of us went to the Taj West End, a five-star Hotel and Restaurant, for dinner. This place belongs to the same chain as the one hit by the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in last month. They kept the front gate shut with guards, armed with shotguns, keeping lookout. They allowed our car in and asked us all to get out. They frisked us down and did a thorough once over on our driver. They put mirrors underneath the vehicle and, God knows why, ran metal detectors over our laptops in the trunk.

After going through an airport-style metal detector, we entered the hotel and went to the restaurant in the back garden. It was absolutely lovely, one of the nicest restaurants I've ever eaten in. It was quiet with a large number of palm trees, other plant life and lovely lighting underneath the night sky.

When they would serve me a bottle of beer, they would hold it to me like a bottle of wine and ask if it was acceptable. I learnt that in India, you are to touch the bottle to ensure it's cold enough before accepting it.

We were some of the only guests the whole night. The staff to customer ratio was like 10:1. It's sad to see; they must be loosing money like mad. That being said, every business in India seems to have at least a 5:1 staff:customer ratio.

There was wireless internet in my flat so I was able to talk to Anja via Skype video. The quality was spot on, I have to give it to the people at Skype for building such a great service and it's reliability, even in any random country, is fantastic.

On Thursday, my driver picked me up to go to work. As we pulled out of the parking garage there was a cow blocking our way. The driver just waited until it moved like it was a slow moving human being. Drivers in Bangalore don't stay in any one lane and they beep at one another constantly; it's the most dangerous driving I have ever experienced in my life!

There are people walking all over the road, animals in the street, people driving the wrong way, people running cart-based shops in the road and no one is paying attention to the police. There is also no such thing as a pedestrian crossing for 90% of central Bangalore, the cars don't stop, they just have wide enough gaps in between them for you to run across the road. I thought seeing cows in the street was the most of it but I heard stories from my colleagues of camels and elephants as well!

A big improvement over previous employers I've worked for is the infrastructure Kieon has in place. The power could go out 2 or 3 times a day but no one would ever notice. We had immediate backups that kicked into place and every device would be kept running as normal. The backup system was rigged right into the normal power sockets so there was no special selection about what devices would get power in case of an outage. Also, all the power sockets are international so just about anything can be plugged in from anywhere and it will work.

I was also impressed by three separate and independent connections to the Internet. Two went via the middle east into Europe and the third went via Asia and the US to reach Europe. I've worked with businesses in Canada and Britain who were shit out of luck if the power or internet died. I can recall asking for an "Iraqi-style power generator" in my last place of employment after we had our 5th blackout of the year.

I had a lot of work to do while I was in India so it was nice to have help at hand. There were three gentlemen that took care of all food and drinks in the office. For the first week, there was a driver to get me to work. Breakfast would be on my desk in the morning and there would be an Indian buffet for all the staff at lunch. Dinners usually involved going out to a nice restaurant and enjoying luxury for a fraction of the price anywhere else I've been before. The funniest thing I came across was when the Maid saw my dirty clothes on the floor in my bedroom and folded and organised them nicely before they were to be washed the following day.

Everyone I worked with was well educated, hard-working and have earned a great place in society. Unfortunately, there is an overwhelming majority of the population in India that lives on less than a dollar a day. There were countless guards, drivers, cooks and other manual labourers I came across who were lucky because they were earning about 2 pounds a day. Every building and business can afford to have an army of guards and just about every restaurant has 4x as many staff as you'd find in Europe.

No one person seems to do all tasks in a job either, everyone does a small portion of the overall bigger task at hand.

When you buy a coffee in Europe, it could be normal that a single person takes you order, charges you, makes the coffee and serves it to you. I went to buy some souvenirs in Bangalore one day and there were people there to say hello, people to answer questions, people to take the items you wanted to buy and they would read the bar codes out to another person who would write up the bill. Then another person would take the items to someone who would wrap them while I went to someone else who I would pay. They would stamp and sign documents stating that I had purchased the items and then I would give that piece of paper to someone else who would instruct someone to hand over the goods to me. Everything in Europe would cost at least a million quid if we had staff overhead like that.

Another thing I noticed was that there were hardly any white people around. I remember coming out of the washroom in a bar one evening and as I walked back to my table I spotted a white girl. We both looked at one another like "What are you doing here?!". The only exception to the hardly-any-white-people rule was the Hard Rock Cafe. With the exception of one of my colleagues, every customer was white. That was weird in itself too.

Everyone spoke English wherever I went. That too was a nice surprise. I thought with a country with so many official languages that there were bound to be some people who couldn't communicate with me in English but this ended up not being the case. I walked past a slum one day and little kids came up to me and asked me what my name was. Why it's Mr. Fuck off of course!

Sleeping was interesting. The flat was absolutely lovely and was in a quiet area (in terms of the number of people surrounding the building, not the noise levels). We had a Shai cemetery next to the house on one side and a military training ground across the road. You usually don't specify road names when taking a taxi, instead you name landmarks nearby. So you can imagine what a weird request it would be to hear from a random white man in the middle of the night "Take me to the Muslim graveyard" or "Take me to the Indian Army base boss".

Every morning I would be woken by the call to prayer and later on by an air-raid siren followed by marching troops chanting "Lets Go!". The first time I heard the air-raid siren I thought, "Oh fuck fuck! It's kicking off with Pakistan!".

If I had any one regret from this trip it would be that I didn't slap any holiday time on at the end of the ten working days. One of my friends went to Goa last month and he had photos of beaches, temples and elephant rides. Most of my pics were taken somewhere in between my home and work.

India is a fascinating place and I'm looking forward to going back to this this wonderful country as soon as I can.