I spent an almost half hour day before yesterday, trying to come up with a good blog post topic; in the end, this is the best I could manage!
I’ve been to Bangalore couple of times. I first went there for about fifteen days around the New Year which fell during my first year in college. I was just seventeen and I enjoyed that trip as any teenager would’ve. I visited various popular places (in and around Bangalore) such as Mysore, Lal Bagh, the three parallel roads (MG, Brigade and Commercial street) etc.: places that I would probably avoid going to at this age! I fell in love with the city and later in fourth year, when the placement season began, I was hoping to land a job in a firm based out of Bangalore. That didn’t happen and I was wondering when I would go back there.
The opportunity came last week when I got a chance to spend a day in Bangalore and that too not on my expenses: well, what could’ve been better than that! I was there on Monday night and had to catch a flight back on Wednesday morning, which also happened to be my 23rd birthday. The best part of my birthday, hence, turned out to be that I celebrated it in both South and North India!
In Bangalore, the weather was awesome as expected. Even though it was mid-May, ACs weren’t required and it was raining on Tuesday evening. But nothing apart from that managed to impress me. The airport was about 40-45kms far from the city and the road connecting the two has been under construction from quite some time now (as I was told by my cab driver): it was in awful condition. The traffic condition inside the city was deplorable too, city roads were very narrow compared to those in Delhi, water logging was an accepted evil and a huge difference between the traffic scenario of Noida and Bangalore was that people follow rules by the book in the latter (when the light turns orange from green, they halt their vehicles and wait patiently for the light to turn green again!). I was also told that there is no night life in the city post-11pm. On Tuesday night, we went to a beer café near UB city- I don’t remember its name but it had good ambience and varieties of home-brewed beers.
For at least a couple of initial years of my work life, I wanted to be in Bangalore but that isn’t so anymore. The weather looks inviting but then, why would you want to go to a place where it would be a headache to even think of going on a long drive on your bike. But as they say, you never know what’s in store for you in the near future.