Trip to Bangalore

hi!! I went to Bangalore for the past 2 days...1st day to attend the launch event...2nd day to roam around the place.

Day 1
Reached bangalore at 6AM and had a lunch-like-breakfast with 4 aloo parathas, 2 club sandwiches and a pineapple juice. Phew!! getting quite heavy with that, went to the nearest lodge & flopped for the next 4 hrs, almost shivering due to the cold weather.

Finding it was already 10:30AM, had a good bath & after another small breakfast ;-) headed to Palace Grounds, where the launch event was about to take place. Btw, if you are wondering what the launch event was, Bill Gates was visiting Bangalore to launch the latest version of the platform for developing and deploying software....Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006.

Event started at about 2:30PM; Bill Gates giving his keynote address for about an hour and after other blah blah blah, the event was over at 6PM. Parikrama was good with their Super Hero song, but other than that i could find they were only screaming with their voices and guitars :)) .

The event as a whole was great. The audience, around 6000 IT pros in and around B'lore and we Microsoft Student Champs from chennai, coimbatore, b'lore and mumbai. It was great learning experience, in that we got to know how Bill thinks. He is thinking at about 20 to 30 years ahead of today (duh! ofcourse he does) & with his proper timing of events, no doubt he is the richest man personally and built a company that is building 300 odd products. He was sharing his vision of the tablet pc as the next revolution, his next investment of $1.7 billion in India over the next 4 years etc. He also mentioned that India is 1 of the primary development centers outside USA. Getting a seat barely 100 metres away from the man, i was no doubt very attentive to his keynote. Thanks a lot to the ADEs for arranging that. Moreover, we had a great time meeting the other champs.

As with any big event, there are some negatives too. The food was as bad as it could be. They served 2 very small bananas (each 1 about an inch in size), 1 cake, 1 veg puff, frooti cool drink, 1 small sandwich, 2 cookies. Anyone with the right brains couldn't have thought of such a wonderfully stupid lunch. That apart, the event was a success.

Day 2
Night dawns early at B'lore and it gets dark very soon. So, waking up at 10AM the next day, i got ready in half hour and went to Lalbagh Gardens. It was a half hour journey from the place called J.P.Nagar. The garden is so huge and its right there in the center of the city. It also has a mini lake inside and the whole atmosphere was cool and great. If you would want some peace amidst the noice of bangalore, then this is the place to go (i would recommend Thekkady lake in Kerala as the first destination).

Now for some positives about Bangalore...
1. Its a good place with a cool-cooler type of weather in contrast to Chennai's hot-hotter weather.
2. A city with lots of opportunites for IT pros because this is the home for some of the biggest software companies.
3. Helpful people and uncheating autorickshaws.
4. Its the place for bird hunting ;-)

As for some negatives,
1. Very crowded. If there is anything else that would determine the time required to reach a place its the worst traffic.
2. Cost of living is high. You need to earn a decent amount to sustain yourself in bangalore.

Personally, i love Bangalore and i would love to work/live there, but it would only come next to Chennai bcos its my darling hometown. How much i had missed this place for the past 2 days??? Phew!!!

hey! did you ever wonder why Bill had to visit this time for the launch???

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