Bangalore Travel Blog Part 1

Introduction

I’m currently travelling to Bangalore, India to visit a large number of off-shore team members we work with on our projects. So for something different, I thought I’d try travel-blogging. I’ll be writing this blog as I go along and then periodically post my progress. This is my second trip to India, I visited Chennai back in 2008 for ten days.

Sage is partnered with several Indian companies to provide extra capacity for our projects. For this trip I’m visiting Sonata which has teams participating in several important Sage projects. I blogged previously on accelerating projects, which was really talking about our adding capacity through additional teams at Sonata. It’s great to have extra capacity and the ability to get more done, but it’s also a big challenge keeping all the teams moving in the same direction and continuously removing roadblocks and bottlenecks. Our goal is to treat the Sonata teams as if they were regular Sage agile teams with full access to all Sage resources like source control and other internal systems. To make this process work many Sonata folk visit our Richmond office and we have several staff visiting Bangalore. This is my turn.

Indian Visa Process

To back up a bit, travelling to India is a bit more difficult than other places due to the Visa process. To do this I needed letters from Sage and from Sonata giving my reasons for travel and that I’m still being paid by a Canadian company. Then you need to fill out and extremely long on-line visa application that includes detailed questions on yourself, your spouse and your parents. Gathering all the data for this form took several days, and when you save this form, it is quite buggy retrieving what you had before, so you need to check it closely. You also need a US sized passport photo and a Canadian passport with 1 year left (since I wanted a 1 year multi-entry visa). With all this you make an appointment with the company (BLS) that processes the visas. The earliest I could book was 1 week later. Then you show up for your appointment and they double check all your papers and take the rather large fee ($200). They take all this as well as your passport and promise to process it in 7 business days. Basically at this point they give it all to the Indian consulate for processing. Fortunately this all went fine and 5 days later their website said my passport was ready for pickup. Generally of all the countries I’ve visited, this is by far the hardest visa process.

Shots

If you don’t travel much, you should go to a travel clinic to get the right shots when visiting India. I travel quite a bit and all my shots are up to date. The first time I went to India, I needed to get 5 injections. I do recommend taking something like Dukoral since I’ve never had any tummy troubles when I’ve taken this ahead of a trip. Malaria pills may or may not be required depending on where you are going.

It’s a Long Way

I travelled to Bangalore via Hong Kong. It’s a 14 hour flight to Hong Kong and then a 6 hour flight on to Bangalore. Generally the best way to endure a long flight is to sleep through it. The Hong Kong flight left at 2:30pm, so I wasn’t sleepy until near end. By the time I was on the Bangalore flight I was so tired I slept through most of the flight. For some reason all international flights in and out of Bangalore arrive and leave between midnight and 4am. When you arrive you don’t really care what time it is just want to get to the hotel and sleep, so make sure you book for a day earlier, so you don’t need to then wait till 2pm to check in.

Managing in Bangalore

Some Indian cities can be quite hard to navigate. But Bangalore is fairly easy. You do need know how to cross the streets (i.e. make eye contact and walk slowly across the traffic, which will flow around you). If you are worried about having to eat lots of extremely hot Indian food, then don’t worry there are many good restaurants from other cultures like Italian or Mexican. Plus generally I don’t find the Indian food that hot here (perhaps it’s toned down for the tourists). I find the level of English was quite good and haven’t had any problems communicating.

Getting directions and finding your way around isn’t that hard and the area around my hotel (in the downtown old part of the city) seems quite safe. There are quite a few parks around and you can see quite a bit just walking around.

The office is 10km away and parts of the journey can be quite congested, but I find the traffic here to be better than in Chennai, Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh City. They are building a new elevated metro system which is causing quite a bit of road disruption along the way, but they seem to keep traffic flowing.

Work Environments

The office building is located in the Global Village Tech Park outside the city. There are quite a few tech companies located here including Sonata, MindTree, Accenture, HP and Texas Instruments. The office environment I’m at is quite nice. The building is modern and the work environment is quite pleasant. It uses an open office concept and provides a nice productive team environment.

Since this is India the company parking is quite different than what you would expect in North America. To maneuver quickly through traffic, two wheels is the way to go. If everyone using motorbikes was to switch to cars it would be total grid lock here.

Conclusion

This ends part 1 of my travel to India. I’m now here and settled in. Getting here is half the battle, now it’s time to get some productive work done.