I got a chance to visit Bangalore last month. Actually Google announced a small meetup for all the GSoC students from India at its Bangalore office on July 28th. As I was returning to IIIT on July 25th, I thought of joining others in Bangalore on my way back. Canceled my reservation (Delhi -> Hyderabad) and re-booked a ticket for Bangalore and back to Hyderabad.

We (Me, Sumit Kataria, Gurpartap Singh) boarded the train from Delhi on July 26th. I knew the other guyz only via IRC but never met them before. They are GSoC students working for Drupal. The journey was fine but a bit of bad luck that Rajdhani was late by two hours. We reached Google office late (by 1 hour). But we didn’t really miss anything because there was a presentation about what Google is and why it is THE GOOGLE. As we didn’t have any breakfast in hurry, we had some snacks at Google. After that there was another presentation by one of the project managers (i forgot the name) about the working style and team structure at Google and how they manage to pull huge projects with small teams. He talked about how projects evolve at Google and some blah blah which I don’t remember.

After than one hour presentation, another break. Time for lunch 😀 As obvious food at Google was just awesome. Then started the real session where students were asked to give a brief overview of the projects they were working on. Few projects were real tough and few others were really creative ideas. I too gave an overview of my project. Google Open Source T-shirts and GSoC stickers were distributed. Then the host took us around the technical wings of Google Bangalore. It was an amazing experience. I was blown by the hardware I saw. The huge LCD monitors in dual display configuration were eye catching.  We left the Google campus at around 5PM.

We headed over to MG road, one of the most famous places in Bangalore. We had real good time over there. After having dinner in McD we returned home. The next day we planned to visit Iskon temple. But it was a complete FAIL as the temple was closed. We got lost and couldn’t find a place to have lunch. After a lot of efforts, we landed at the central bus terminal. Had dossa there and left for home. Traffic is just awesome in Bangalore. It took us around 2.5 hours to get back. The journey was frustrating and we were tired enough to get anywhere. Yet we left for the MG Road again. We enjoyed a lot. Did some shopping too.

The next day I headed back to Hyderabad. All in all Bangalore is way techie as compared to Hyderabad. Hyderabad is still in its nascent stages of development. Only negative factor I saw in Bangalore is terrific traffic.

Me presenting my project @ Google Bangalore

Gurpartap presenting his project @ Google Bangalore

MacBookAir @ iStore

Strange bus I saw for the very first time 😀