Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Hyderabad Tie Indus - Ind Trip

In one of the emails I get from Tie, Bangalore, I saw that there was this Tie meet in Hyderabad Sept 19,20,21 - 2006. There was a showcase your venture presentation and two days of presentations by various industry leaders. I found this very irresistable and promptly registered for firt two days , and a two way ticket by Air Deccan.

I left bangalore on 19th sept, to catch the 5:55 PM flight. I almost missed the flight and got in at the last minute. I was drifting through the airport without paying attention to the announcement made by Deccan for my name. It would have been a disaster had I missed the flight.
The flight was almost full( these days very few flights are empty ) and I settled into one of the rows at the rear. The flight was the usual domestic trip, the regulation safety announcement, seat belts sign announcement, the hauling of snacks for sale by two serious looking air hostess and then another announcement about the landing.

I landed at the airport and took a taxi to Jubilee hills. Not sure of where the Marri Chenna reddy institute was, I called my friend Amala who gave me the correct address. I landed at a cafe coffee day and found that the HRD institute is still a few km away. Took another Auto found the godavari guest house and settled into a pleasant nice room.

Mr. Hemal ( my room mate ) and I had a quick dinner at the cafe taria. Watched TV for a while and I slept at around 11 PM. But could not sleep properly as I was very hungry from that days jogging. Got up at 4 am and needing to kill time, booted up the computer and started writing this blog.

Monday, September 04, 2006

Bride hunting 1

An interesting topic:

I have been searching for brides on and off since 2000. That was the year I decided I need a companion which being in India usually has to be a wife!. Needless to say I started with internet matrimonial sites and I got a stready stream of potential brides after I first registered online in 2000.

Being young and with a decent job in the USA , and with a high perhaps highly inflated ( - as my friends sometimes call me) view of myself, I was choosy. Of course there were some girls that did not respond to my messages. either.

At this time i mostly restricted myself to Telugu speaking girls. The first few were an interesting bunch. One was a tall gawky girl with olily hair. Not sure if I wanted to be with this one.

House Renting in Bangalore

House renting in bangalore is one more fascinating exercise, that is an art and has its own quirks.
I had lived in three rented houses in Bangalore. One reason was I was single and was also not sure of staying back in india the first few months I came to India, so did notreally think of buying a house.

The first house was small two bedroom house on a quiet street in a otherwise nosiy neighborhood ( actually every neighborhood in bangalore is noisy ) called RT nagar. The land lady was a nice old lady with some mood swings ocassionally that are best avoided. The rent was a princely 4000 thousand rupees. I did not have a lot of baggage with me, so I was in the house for a year. but lack of sunlight and parking for my vehicle forced me to go to a new house.

I found another brand new house a few streets away and moved there in the first week of janb2005
. The owner was nice and quiet gentelman who worked for Bangalore city corporation. This apartment had a basement car parking and a nice veranda and plenty of sunlight. I liked this house, but the only problem was the noise outside during office hours .
I was here for almost year and half.
When i joined Flat world, I had to commute to Banashankari , a far off neighborhood 20 kms away. 20 kms in Bangalore means one hour of commute. So i spent around 2 hours of commute everyday. Driving in Bangalore is not a pleasant experience. So i finally decided to move.

So the next step is to find a house. How do i do that. I first walked around the streets near the new office , looking for to let signs. I found a house on the street as the office was in and saw the hous. IT was a nice 3 bed room house, a bungalow type house, where the owner stayed in the first floor and the ground floor was rented.

I still did not finalise, I wanted to see some more houses and finally found a real estate broker ( that is what they are called ) in dingy office in front of my Office. He showed me around a couple of houses in the neighborhood, all of which promptly rejected, as they did not have parking or roads were not paved etc.
Finally i went back the same 3-bed room house. This one had nice parking in front of the house, and being in the same street meant I avoided the harrowing Bangalore commute ,that I could definitely could do without. The time saved in commute was also a big attraction.

Finally I moved in to this house and have not regretted moving in here. The house owner is a plesant man who has retired as an officer in Reserve bank of India ( the equivalent of federal reserve in the US ) .


After a long time I could enjoy my lunch in the privacy of my house. !

Maid servants in Bangalore.

Hiring , retaining and letting go ( if necessary ) of maid servants is an interesting exercise in itself. When I moved to Bangalore from the New jersey, I felt I did not need a maid, as I was used to cooking for myself in the states.

After a while, i realised I needed a maid to clean my house and could have her clean the dishes as well. I hired a old lady that promised to come on time and do my dishes. Couple of months after several demands for salary advances loans and broken dishes, I fired her.

After I moved to another in the same neighborhood ( RT Nagar ) , I hired another maid, this one younger and little more trustworthy. She agreed to clean my house twice a week for 300 Rs. Then I hired another lady, another young lady, for 1200 per month for cooking. These two were easy to deal with and fairly regular and I employed them for a year and half, when I had to move to Banashankari , neighborhood 20 kms southwest of the city.

After moving to the new house, hired a maid that was working for my house owner, she came for 15 days and took a months salary and never turned up again.