Bangalore, through the eyes of a foreigner

Recently I came across a book in the company library. The name of the book is ‘An exemplary family in Bangalore’, written by Bob Hoekstra, CEO of Philips Software Center in Bangalore. The book describes Bob’s experiences in the Garden City. A book with 62 pages and 27 chapters was successful in captivating my attention thought out the reading. The sketches in the book are rendered by Soumen Chakraborty. The title of the book immediately caught my attention. Most of the chapters are short and I wished they were longer.

The book describes Bob’s view of the Banglorean life, the change that the IT industry has brought about along, the attitude of the residents towards this change. He gives a humorous description to the day to day events which might seem normal to a resident. Some chapters in the book are indeed thought provoking.

I liked the chapter titled, ‘Ellora Caves’. Bob describes the Kailasa temple with the big software companies flourishing in Bangalore. Someone like me who works in a software company might find this chapter interesting. He writes that it would cost the software engineers around sixty billion euros to complete the Kailasa temple, with all the planning and the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) modeled software development. I am reproducing the last lines in the chapter here. The chapter ends like this...

“One can just wonder what will remain of the work of this army of software engineers, a thousand years from now. If it something like the Kailasa temple, it will get World Heritage Status.”

A must read book for every Bangalorean.