premshree

“Work is work. I don’t think twice before going to a place; I’ll take the passenger wherever he wants to go.”

He spoke good English. He said he liked speaking in English with his passengers when he could. “Whenever I get a chance, I speak in English with my passengers. This is my classroom, this is where I learn whatever I can.” He spoke, enunciating each word, with a slight American accent. “Once I had an American passenger and I spoke to him a lot. He was amazed at my English. He said my English was better than many people in his office. That made me very happy.” He’s married and has a kid. I told him his kid is lucky. “I talk anything. It’s the only time I can. I hope I’m not boring you.” I told him I was enjoying listening.

“Whenever the passengers are talking, I try to hear so I can learn new words. If I don’t understand a word I sometimes ask the passenger.” I told him his English was pretty good. He smiled. “Sometimes some people don’t like it when I speak English. They probably think I’m trying to show off. But I don’t apologize because I didn’t do any wrong—I just want to learn.”

He dropped the other guy off (it was raining hard, and we—Pankaj and I—couldn’t find a rick, so this guy asked us to join him since he was headed in that direction anyway), and then we headed to the airport. I told him I wish all auto guys around here were like him. My flight was at 21:30; it was about 21:00 then. I had missed this flight twice in the past, and I didn’t really care if I missed it this time. I asked him if he’d like to have tea. He parked his rick and we had tea and smokes.

His name was Mohammad Rafi. Nice guy.

After living practically out of the office for over a year, I finally have my own place. Pankaj was looking for a place for himself some months back, and he asked me if I’d like to move in with him. I reluctantly said yes—I wasn’t too keen on renting a place then.

The broker guy showed us several blue-pink houses with their USPs being “you can see diamond district from here, saar” and such. We were pissed.

We chanced upon our penthouse—yes, it’s a penthouse, not by Bombay standards, but yeah, a four-floor building is what you get in Bangalore—when the broker was showing us another flat in the same building. We had to rent the place. And we did.

It wasn’t very easy getting the house ready, though. I don’t know why, but there seems to be something terribly wrong with the way folks here conduct business: “yes saar, ready saar, today evening, done”. But of course, it never gets done for a month. Anyway, after giving up on them later (agreeing to bright yellow and ivory white being the same color, etc.), we moved in.

Pankaj and I have been shopping for curtains, cushions and things like that. I’m quite happy about how the place is turning out.

Here are some pictures. Pankaj’s pictures.

So the police drove us all out of Barista. It was 23:30. What fuck of a place is this?

So I’m off to Bombay in a bit. The evening will be spent partying with Krunal (who’s in India on vacation). Tomorrow morning all of us (family) fly to Mangalore, from where we’re headed to Mookambika (I realized that I’ve been there before). After that we’ll head to Calicut.

Back in Bangalore Monday morning. Long weekends are fun. :-)

Day two saw the Ruby track. My talk — where I tried to talk about things different in Ruby — was followed by Yogi’s, where he talked about the syntax and things like that. This was followed by a Ruby on Rails tutorial by Avik. The turn-out for the talks was very encouraging.

Evening was spent drinking with jackol. Dublin followed by Purple Haze. (Haze played Cradle of Filth’s version of Hallowed Be Thy Name! Yay!)

Didn’t attend much of day three, except for the web services BoF. Later, Rasmus, Gopal, bluesmoon, teemus and I headed to Opus for dinner. Man, that place rocks. Totally.

Attended a couple of DB talks on day four, and mostly just hung around and met people and stuff. Of course, there was the rock show later which was pretty decent.

Swaroop has tons of pictures. Photos from all.

I’m a tired man. The Year End Party’s tomorrow, after which I’ll be a tireder [sic] man. I’m off to Bombay next weekend for some rest.

I was working late night so I woke up at 10:30 or so. Took a shower and then headed to the venue. Oh man it’s awesome to meet people — the best thing about the conference.

The Open Source at Google talk had one slide talking about the open source stuff they use. I didn’t know SSL was open source software! Haha.

All the Ruby talks are tomorrow. We’re gonna have an informal Ruby meet at Pecos or someplace in MG road after all the talks. As of now, Dibya Prakash, Yogi and I have confirmed. Please let me know if you’re coming!

Oh yeah, tag photos with fossin2005.

Blogging is teh suck and all, but I’ve had an interesting day, so I might as well blog

Well, yesterday was spent at office. Now that’d normally not be interesting, but, yesterday happened to be Diwali, dammit! (I realized it was Diwali when I saw lights and heard crackers bursting when I went to the balcony for you-know-what.) Anyway, so I hoped I’d do some shopping — toothbrush and toothpaste shopping (both of which, like every fucking time, I had forgotten to carry). Anyway, the Chinese rock songs followed by Virgin Radio Classic Rock meant that it was too late for me to buy anything. I just wanted to do something, so I went to Lakeview (a really nice snack place on MG road). Had some coffee, roast lamb sandwich, and read some Freakonomics. Went back to office after that and then slept for a long time.

Today, as I said earlier, was interesting, which is why I’m even posting this crap. Well, so I was hoping to get my baggage from Thai today (since it must’ve arrived in the airport the previous night). I called the Thai city office; they said “the baggage has been sent from Bangkok, but that’s all we know.” Basically implying that she doesn’t have information whether my bag mysteriously decided to fly mid-air or something. She gave me the number of the Thai airport office. (Unlike the impression that I might’ve given you about the lady, she had a really sweet voice.) Anyway, nobody’d answer at the airport, so I decided to just go to the airport and get done with. Turns out things are (understandably) not as simple as I thought — my baggage was with the customs, and they require a relieving letter from the Thai folks. Unfortunately, turned out the Thai folks wouldn’t be in until at least 14:00 because they don’t have flights flying on Wednesdays (it was 11:30 at this time). So I headed back to office. I get a call from my uncle that the airport folks had said that my baggage had arrived, etc. I called the airport folks, and turns out I had to go to the Joint Working Group, not the Thai office. So I headed to the airport (again), got my baggage. Next thing to do was to book my flight to Bombay. You know how it feels to carry two bags (one of them over 40 kilograms of... chocolates)? Yeah. So there were just too many folks at the Kingfisher counter, so I decided to screw them and headed over to the Jet counter. Managed to get tickets. My flight was at 18:00. (It was 15:00 at this time.)

I headed to office, packed things I needed to carry, etc. Now the interesting thing is that I didn’t have any of my clothes, which meant that I had to go home for them. So I got a rick guy who agreed to take me to Hennur and then to the airport from there. I reached Hennur at about 17:15. We left at 17:20. Half way the rick runs out of gas. I reached the airport at 18:00. When I get to the counter, I’m told that the flight has been closed. There, I actually missed my flight. This is the first time that this is happening to me. Sure, I’ve been late and all in the past, but missing! — this’d be the first. Well, there’s always a first time and all that jazz.

Anyway, I’ve been booked into the next flight, scheduled for 20:45. Gives me good reason to spend my time composing this thing. I didn’t know the WiFi here isn’t free, btw.

Anyway, The City will make up for all of this shit.

I think I’m bored of Bangalore. The pubs too.