What you’ve written is getting to be typical of a lot of Indian cities these days. Last year I flew to Gurgaon to attend a client meeting, and I was amazed to say the least by that city. The high speed expressway teeeming with tens thousands of cars, the huge gleaming glass and steel office blocks that line up the skyline, … it all made for a scene stright out of Dubai or somewher else. My meeting was at the Trident – a hotel that would put any other city hotel anywhere in the world to shame – and I later stayed the night at the Galaxy Hotel, which wasnt too bad either.

I returned with images of Gurgaon as this slick fast growing megapolis that rivalled the likes of Dubai, Shanghai or Singapore.

Silly me.

On my second trip to Gurgaon, I had to make a visit to an upcoming office facility for our company at MG Road. Only you would be able to imagine my shock and disappointment when the hotel limousine turned off the super modern expressway and entered the real Gurgaon behind the false facade: beat up traffic trundling along broken up roads flanked by open sewers, while cows and heaps of garbage filled every available piece of open ground. From here, Gurgaon seemed more like a farce or a con-job than anything remotely close to a city. Later i was to learn that you get power for only twelve to thirteen hours a day – with most office blocks making do with diesel run back up generators. For all the gleaming pools and water landscapes at the Trident, Gurgaon suffers an enormous water shortage in addition to the power cuts.

India is full of complete opposites. Glad you know that well. buit even more glad that you had a good time in India. Would love to meet sometime later when you drop in again.

It was so lovely to meet you and now to read your account of your visit to Bangalore. I lived there in 1995-96 and where I return periodically to see family and friends.

My impressions of Bangalore’s new airport and the road were similar to yours. They are impressive to say the least. Then about 2h40min later, when I arrived at my family’s home, I had tired of the air-conditioning and only wanted to sleep seeing as I had woken at an ungodly hour in Mumbai to take the flight. That is a major drawback of the airport – no transport links and as I found on my way out of BLR, not enough capacity either at check-in or airside. I think I duly tweeted it all.

That said, old Bangalore has its charms intact although sadly the locals do not participate so much in the new economy. Some time if you are in BLR, at the same time as me, I would love to take you around into Bangalore’s gardens and old city.

And on free Wi-Fi, you are absolutely right. I had stayed in what one of my blog-readers, an American living in South India, calls ‘Five Star India’, for a week before I reached Bangalore. I paid hand over fist for wireless web access both in the Taj and in Four Seasons in Delhi and Mumbai, much to my annoyance.

Hope we will meet again some time soon.

PS: I see you had ‘meter kaapi’ so called because when you pour the small glass into the bowl, you do so from the height of a meter, creating the froth on the surface