Horn OK Please
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Welcome to the left side of the road. Driving is an agressive sport. Lane lines are loose suggestions. Honk (daytime) or flash lights (nighttime) to request to pass. Honking quickly becomes meaningless. Indians are intimately aware of the dimensions of their motor vehicles. I am in a world of 20,000 compact lorries. Turn signals do not exist. Driving in the world's smallest minivan, the trip from Bombay to Pune takes about three and a half hours. We begin deep in the city. Everything seems smaller, squarer, and more scrunched together than in America. Economic stratification is starkly apparent. Slums push close to the expressway: four feet from the outermost lane is a palace of cardboard and corrugated aluminum, complete with an archway and balcony, but no one seems to be enjoying it. Stray dogs wander the streets. People are asleep on the 3-foot median between opposing lanes of the expressway. When my driver rolls down his window to pay a toll, I smell a powerful odor which I can only guess is a combination of tropical foliage and carbon emission particulates. We travel for an hour before we get to a place I feel comfortable calling "outside the city": the expressway is still lined with buildings, but they aren't brightly lit anymore and there is actually space to walk in between them. Soon we are winding our way through the Western Ghats mountain range, and around 4:15am we find ourselves at our destination in Pune.
Holy culture shock, Batman
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The line between "indoors" and "outdoors" is fuzzy and elusive. I try to force myself to head-bobble, but all that I do is nod. With time, with time. Sailesh says, "this doesn't really feel like India." Admittedly, we are in a nicer part of town, but it still looks like the poorest sections of urban Texas I've seen. Most shops are outdoors, with perhaps an extended overhead tarp for shade. Places that have air conditioning have it cranked down to about 65 F. Clothing varies wildly between stale business casual and colorful traditional clothes. Overpopulation is very real. I purchase three liters of Aquafina water for 42 rupees ($0.90). The ketchup is spicy. Crossing the street involves getting one's personal affairs in order and preparing psychologically for death before failing a few attempts to step defiantly into traffic, finally building the courage to do so, ignoring a chorus of horns, and getting grazed by anywhere from two to five autorickshaws. Individual power outlets have on/off switches, as does the water heater, which is only used when needed, producing scaling water in a just a few minutes. How wasteful we are with electricity in America. After spending a day in Pune, seeing a man walking his forty goats down the street seems ordinary. Mimosas and other tropical plants flourish even in the urban sprawl. The palm trees here make those in Houston seem cute.
Compact Homes
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A place I feel safe to call home. Most closely described as a hotel, the place has great service, good food, and they gave Sam a bouquet of flowers on his birthday, having known him for only eight hours. Breakfast is complimentary; other meals can be made upon request for a low charge. The elevator plays a monophonic, MIDI-sounding "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" on endless loop. My pillow is much too tall, making it uncomfortable to rest my head on. My mattress has about the consistency of granite. My blanket is hardly insulating. I don't really care.
Names
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"Are you from Mumbai?"
"Bombay, yes."
In the 1990s, many of India's cities had their names officially changed. Bombay became Mumbai; Poona became Pune; Madras became Chennai; Calcutta became Kolkata. Referring to the old names is common in speech, but uncommon in text (such as signs). How do Indians feel about it?
Weather
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It is about 90 F in the daytime, ten degrees cooler at night. The humidity makes Houston seem like Dallas. We arrived just as the monsoon season begins. The sky today is mostly cloudless, though that can change quickly. The 10-day forecast is a redundant listing of "scattered thunderstorms".
BMC Software
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Home: a cubicle-station on the 9th floor of a 9-floor office building. The place is fairly bare, but it is remarkably clean and looks very new. Everything is colored bright orange and blue. I am assigned to a low-walled cubicle in an eight-person, landlocked (windowless) office. Ah, home! The staff is quite laid back and silly. This office is about as close as you could get to being America without having any white guys. The frequency of regular nods is on par with the frequency of Indian head-bobbles. Two are wearing jeans, the rest slacks; three are wearing polos, the rest button-downs; one is wearing a brown leather jacket and another claims he has been wearing the same shirt for a week. It is the Incubation Center: the department of BMC responsible for generating the most innovative new products. Code names of past projects include "Skywalker", "Lightsaber", and "Stargate". Vishal gives us the run-down of the project we'll be working on: porting one of BMC's products to mobile devices (AKA building iPhone apps). Vishal speaks to us like equals, assuming we have a strong background in software development. I understand nearly all of what he says, but not without effort. The project seems fun and challenging. IT brings in Dell computers to our stations; we get settled. They managed to spell both of our names wrong: Nicholas McLendon and Shailesh Prabhu. So now my nametag, username, and company email address are all incorrect. I decide the easiest solution is to change my name for the duration of my visit. Besides, the username "nmclendo" is way cooler than "nmcclend" anyways. Prior to visiting, we had been in contact with four people at BMC, each at a different layer of corporate hierarchy: Pankaj Dhume, CEO of BMC Software India; Tarun Sharma, Vice President of Research & Development; Suhas Kelkar, Director of Product Development; Abhijeet ___, worker guy (who I don't think I've actually met, though I did talk to him over the phone). The whole office, including Suhas and all the programmers, takes us out to lunch at a genuine Indian restaurant. We drive in two small cars which make VW Beetles seem extraordinarily spacious. I get a number of looks at the restaurant. The food is supplied by waiters who keep giving me things until I tell them to stop. I sample everything. Delicious. I am able to sustain conversational banter on the way back, a success I attribute to sleep deprivation. I fight off sleep by playing with an iPad for the remaining hours until I return home at about 5:30pm.