I know how you feel, mate – baggage handlers take a break at Hindustan airport, Bangalore, India.
Anyone who thinks that building big shiny infrastructure is the key to attracting foreign investment should come to Bangalore. India’s third most populous city used to be a place to retire and the key industry used to be market gardening. As an out-of the way place, with no major airport, it was the obvious choice to locate India’s burgeoning military development back in the Seventies. The result was thousands of well-trained engineering and IT graduates, just in time for the IT Boom that followed. Bangalore is now a major world IT centre, due mainly to one factor – cost. Think of any multinational that has a presence in Ireland – chances are that they have a centre in Bangalore too.
Bangalore is trying to catch up with the demands of the industries that are bursting out of the city boundaries. They’ve just started digging a new metro system (I’ll bet it will be up and running before the Dublin one, too). The power system is a bit flakey too, and short blackouts are common (the trick is not to be in an elevator when it happens). As for the roads, they have plenty of them – they just happened to be clogged with the craziest drivers on the planet. Bangalore has the population of Ireland – it also had 900 road deaths last year, with another 6,000 injuries. Highlights on this trip was a digger doing a U-turn into our taxi’s path from the other side of a dual carriageway – at night, without lights.
They are also having an election this weekend – one of the quotes in the local newspaper had voters complaining about a ‘real-estate mafia’ running the country – wouldn’t happen here, eh ? The current airport was due to close the day before i arrived, but teething problems meant that the launch was postponed until the end of the month [unlike in Heathrow, where they opened the new Terminal Five too soon]. I was happy about the postponement for another reason. The new airport is about 35 km outside the city, which will entail a 2-hour drive, probably at night (that’s when many of the international flights arrive) and probably at breakneck speed (and in India, that’s not just a figure of speech.
Camera = Canon G9, ISO=400, aperture=2.8, speed=1/60.