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.

In Bombay, the higher up your house the more you pay. For example, in one of the places we’ve looked at, there’s a floor rise cost of INR 20 per sq. ft. So, basically, a 1000 sq. ft. flat in the 17^th floor would cost around INR 300,000 more than the flat in the lowest floor (2^nd).

When I was in Chennai, my friend who was taking me around, pointed me to a bunch of buildings where, apparently, a lot of Tamil movie songs are shot (Chennai’s Hiranandani, I guess). Out of curiosity I asked him how much a flat there’d cost. He said something, and added that the higher up you go the cost decreases. If that’s true, well, Chennai is probably new to the living-in-a-flat thing.

That’ll change.

Oh yeah, in Bombay now.

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.

So after a successful conference in Bangalore, Agile India comes to Mumbai. 29^th and 30^th July, 2005. It’ll be held at SPCE, Andheri. The initial list of proposals are here. I’ll be speaking on Ruby and agility.

I’m speaking on 29^th—Saturday. The rest of the day promises to be good. Don’t know what I’m doing Sunday.