Monday, May 18, 2009

Bangalore calling

I delayed my joining at the Bangalore centre by 1 week to attend Siddharths marriage and what a blessing it turned out to be (why this was a blessing would be narrated in a later story).
It was really exiting getting in the airplane after such a long time; my last journey on this machine was nearly 3 years back when I went to Singapore with Rahul.
A strange kind of adrelenine was rushing through my body when the plane took off and as I saw the objects from the window getting smaller and smaller; smaller cars smaller buildings, it felt terrific in the air at that point of time.
I don’t quite remember which movie I saw in the flight but I really did enjoy the flight with the sexy airhostess serving me in there, I was feeling like a king out there in the sky.
When I finally landed up at the Bangalore airport and put my first steps out of the flight a gush of fresh air hit me on the face, like somebody giving me a light hug saying "welcome to Bangalore".
WOW finally I was in Bangalore, they city of gardens, the city I visited 10 years back with my family.
I called up home and told everybody I had reached safely here , then called up Ankur to get directions to his house. It was almost 3 years since we last met apart from a meeting at CP 2 months back where we had Carlsberg with Roasted Chicken at the Minar.
WOW, the feeling was still so fresh and it was so good to breathe the air; the airport looked beautiful; it felt like a dream being here.

After getting directions from Ankur I boarded a Volvo route no 8 , my first Volvo trip here and headed to his home nearly 50 km and an hour and half’s journey from here.
The road was magnificent; the A/C was really cool and the scenery terrific

It felt good coming in here and watching the coconut trees, I still could not imaging being in this place. When the city finally did start after an hour or so after we started the IT parks took over and one after the another I saw these huge buildings in the background; Nokia , AOL , Accenture , CISCO , JP Morgan , ARM , Oracle ..........the list just continued , this is why they call Bangalore the IT hub of India.
Unfortunately, I got down at the wrong stop thanks to my conductor and I called up Ankur for help, he came to pick me up in his car 10 minutes later and it felt good seeing him after years.

This was my first house in Bangalore , His room was quite neat and clean considering he was staying alone up there.
I was damm exited to be in here that I said lets get moving as soon as I put my stuff up there, it was nearly 4 at that time but I wanted to just get out and explore the city.
We called up Adi ( Aditya) as we call him and planned to meet at Forum ( that was my favourite hangout in Bangalore for the next 2 months) , caught a bus , changed another bus then another and finally did land up there at 6.
The first time I saw Forum , I was a little disappointed considering what Ankur told me that this as the biggest mall in here ; frankly speaking it was smaller than the centerstage mall at Noida and in that respect it did seem pretty small.
After roaming in for a while Adi arrived in his conventional looks, wearing his loose T-shirt and slippers as usual, he has not changed 1 bit since college days.
We planned to have beer and entered some pub , don’t remember the name though. The music was brilliant there, it was slow rock and I was so damm drunk that i couldn’t understand 1 word of the songs but still it felt good listing to the guitars playing in the background.
We ordered 2 pitchers for 500 bucks and after the booze had dinner at some Northindian joint , it was 11 in the night and somehow we did make it home that day.
My first day in Bangalore ended here.

This was my first day there and my next two months here would be as rocking as my final day…………………….