I am now in Bangalore. I am staying at a new hotel called IndiOne — they just changed their name so they will now be Ginger. Very interesting place. At Taj, I had to pay more than $300/night, here it is less than $30/night. This is a basic hotel a new concept. All basic needs are met — and is quite clean and neat. No frills, just very basic things. Good Wi-Fi thru Tata indicom. I am posting this using this while uploading some pictures to Flickr.
A very interesting thing — the Z TV here has completely different advertisements. Not a single advertise of any Baba or somebody you can call to get all your problems solved. USA version has more than 50% commercials related to those help people. When talking to some friends about this, they all think that this only reflects that US based NRIs are frozen in time. I have difficulty accepting that because if these were the people who depended on Babas to solve their problems when they were in India, they would not be so successful in their edcational and professional life. So there is something deeper behind that. The fact that most friends — who are well educated and successful professionals in California — were not surprised about this is surprising to me.
It is always interesting to see how rapidly Bangalore is growing. This hotel is in their Industrial area where more buildings are under construction than are constructed. I think I will take out my camera and post some pictures of construction on Flickr.