Independence Day

From Miscellaneous India...

I'm not really in the mood to write a great deal about this - see the below post for an explanation of why I'm in an unhappy mood.

However, while I was posting about the depressing events in Hyderabad (and the exciting and awesome hill climb today) I wanted to mention these pictures which are now in my Misc. India album. A week ago Wednesday (August 15) we were strongly advised against going to work because it was Indian Independence day, and lest we make Microsoft look unpatriotic, most of us took the opportunity to do some Bangalore sightseeing. The captions tell most of the story, so take a look at the album if you're interested.

Robaluru?

This came up in the last post, and so it's worth saying something about. So the road I live on, the one that goes towards Sankey Tank, used to be called Sankey Road, but it is now Chowdaiah Road. There is a drive all across India to name things less British sounding names, and I imagine the newspapers and such will be mentioning this more as we approach August 15, when the American expats in India will celebrate with the Indian citizens our collective history of saying in the clearest possible terms that we would like the British to leave, please.

Anyway, it seems that the city itself has finally managed such a name swap, even though it took a few years and approval from something like 18 agencies (due to the simply stunning power of Indian bureaucracy), and is now properly Bengaluru. I'm all for it, even if it means that my domain name is already obsolete :).