"It may sound silly, but for two people in the software profession,
having a good connection is pretty high on the priority list," says
Chopra. "In our first apartment, we had a
broadband connection
that, in actuality, gave us speeds less than that of a modem
connection."
Many of the high-tech jobs are concentrated in industrial parks
like Electronics City or the International Tech Park Bangalore,
both of which house more than 100 companies. Commuting to work
means a daily journey through horrendous traffic. Some expats drive
scooters or take taxis or public transit buses. Others, like
Cecilia Villalon, take a three-wheeled auto rickshaw.
Those who can afford it will buy or rent a car, and then hire a
driver to navigate the labyrinth of roads. Arman Zand, a vice
president with Silicon Valley Bank
India Advisors Pvt. Ltd., owns
his own car and hires a driver for daily traffic, but he drives
himself at nights and on weekends.
Formerly of
San Jose,
California, Zand sees the city as having some
similarity to the Bay Area's high-tech boom. "The level of energy
and entrepreneurialism reminds me of Silicon Valley, 1999," he
says. "Venture capitalists, service providers, financial
institutions, and young entrepreneurs are constantly roaming the
coffee shops and hotel lobbies."
In some districts,
Bangalore eagerly embraces the tech generation
in the manner of cities like
San Francisco and
Seattle. The air is
rife with the chatter of cellphone conversations, and laptops fill
the Café Coffee Day shops, India's equivalent of Starbucks.
Invitations for web design and programming classes flutter on
bulletin boards. But outside the gates of the gleaming tech
campuses, it's back to India. "The obvious difference is the
infrastructure," says Zand. "It's hard to ignore what goes on
outside of the business climate."