Week 12:

A little late but as promised, I've uploaded most of the pictures from the Delhi trip onto Picasa. You can see them in the "Images From India" slideshow, or you can click the slideshow to look through them. I've chosen a picture showing exactly how huge the Taj Mahal really is, that little black on the bottom is me.

Our supervisor, Badri wasn't here this morning, nor were any of the people on the security team that I knew so I asked Bala of switching to introduce me to some of the security people, with whom we will be spending this last. So far in security we've gone over some of the basics of network security, such as using a TrendMicro server, layer-7 content filtering, defining traffic types using class-maps and match statements, and using zones to lock down a router and its connected networks. In the upcoming days I'm hoping to learn more about CISCO crypto-maps and different VPN types.

This will be my last week here in Bangalore before leaving. It will be nice to be back home, and I'm really looking forward to the 2 week trip in Europe that I've been planning, but I'm going to a miss a bunch of friends I've made here.

Bangalore is a city of almost 6 million people and it takes an hour and a half to go from one side of it to the other. In spite of this, you run into people you know almost everywhere. In the 5-6 hours I was in town on Saturday with friends I ran into three other people I knew, and Chase ran into a few people he met from an activity a couple weeks ago. I later found out that I was in the same area as bunch of people from the church, but didn't see them. Other people have communicated this to me as well, that as soon as you've met a couple people, it feels like you know half the city.

This week I had a cookoff with Swetha and a bunch of her friends, which we had been planning for a week or two. Swetha made an Indian dish; a dal, chapathi, and fried potatoes in the shape of (angry) smiley-faces. I made a cheese fondue, which had to be very modified to fit ingredients available here, but still turned out alright. Those present judged, chose wisely, and I'm now the proud owner of a new pair of sunglasses, the stakes of the cookoff. I guess promising chocolate fondue this week if I came away the winner may have been cheating a little bit, but if political campaigners can do it, so can I. I'll even follow through on my promise if I can find chocolate chips: can I find them....Yes, I can!

Also went with several friends to see Salt with Angelina Jolie. It had the chick, shooting, a predictable plot, and people punching each other, all the makings of a good action flick. Not even comparable to Inception the other week, but still decent.

I wish I could find some way to express more about my experience here in India, things I've learned about the mixture of old culture and new, the divided political climate, the acknowledgement and almost acceptance of widespread corruption, the way English vocabulary is used slightly differently, the way they think of themselves and their perceptions of outsiders, the tradition of joint-family houses and the ties one feels to his/her home state even after removed from it for generations. I suppose the most valuable parts of an experience are also the most intricately difficult to communicate.

This week is going to be pretty full of activity, in addition to trying to enjoy my last week, I have a paper to finish writing, security to study, last-minute preparations for my trip to Europe, and more never-ending LSAT stuff to go through. Plus I need to make sure that I successfully get everything in my apartment in once place; it seems that every time I go anywhere I manage to forget something. I should start picking up things from around my apartment right now just to make sure I don't accidentally leave housekeeping some unwanted gift.

-Scott

Week 11:

Last week I went to see Inception; if you haven't seen it I suggest that you do. One concept of the story is the idea of layered dreams, where you think you wake up, but later realize that you just woke up from one dream and entered another. Coming back from Delhi made me realize my living situation right now is kind of a dream-in-a-dream state. You could consider my family's home in American Fork as the original layer, where my long-term stuff is kept and my mail is sent. The next layer down is my apartment in Provo where I have lived for a year and will be returning in about a month. Next is my current residence in Bangalore; and during the past 3 days I was staying with a member family in New Delhi. With one exception, it takes an airplane ride to act as a "kick" from one residence to another. As I was returning to Bangalore from New Delhi my mind thought it was undergoing a different kick, and for a split second I thought I had forgotten all my luggage, not making the connection that I was returning to BGL and not to the US.

Of the things I noticed while in Delhi, there are a few that stood out very strongly at first. Delhi is hot, in more way than one. I was greeted by a blast of searing humidity air as I stepped off the plane onto the pavement; Delhi temperatures frequently pass 40c, 104f. Since it is the monsoon season there were occasional rains, but they weren't accompanied by wind or cooler weather, so they did little other than disguise the sweat streaks on the back of my shirt. The other hotness in Delhi is the girls. Indian women in general are pretty good looking, but northern Indians are dis-proportionally good looking! I don't know if it was a change in facial shape, eyes, complexion, or what, but I'm positive that there was a statistically significant increase in beautiful women in Delhi. Chase and I have started using the phrase "north-Indian" as code for great looking girls.

Boodu, a member in New Delhi and our guide for the weekend, picked us up from the airport and took us to drop our bags off at Bro. Nobels' house. We then headed out directly to see the sites of Old Delhi. We saw a very recently built Hindu Temple, covered in elephants acting out parts of different stories. The Gandhi Memorial was in a large park inside the city, where he was buried near his daughter and grandson, all victims of the Gandhi family tradition of assassination. Mahatma Gandhi was buried in a walled garden, with an eternal flame burning. His grandson, Rajiv, had a large flat monument overseeing a lake, with a Vietnam memorial-like wall alongside it. Indira, considered a tyrannical ruler by many, had a big rock with a rope around it, not quite on-par with the others put to rest in the park. We then headed over to the red fort, where Indian Independence from Britain was announced. Jumped on the metro (where I got some smiles from a very north-Indian girl) to get to a massive underground market to find a leather bag I've been hunting for, which I have yet to locate. Think Indian Jones, that's the kinda bag I have in mind. We went to Karims, a restaurant that gained popularity over a hundred years ago, and has continued cooking the same recipes for a century. Their roti, a flat-bread, was flattened out from a ball, and placed in an underground pot to be cooked. We ate it with a dal, along side mutton kebab rolls, and a chetni sauce, all of which was incredible.

The next morning we were up at 6:00 to start on the road to Agra, a 4-hour journey. We had a little bit of car problems. The car was having as difficult a time in the heat as we were, but fortunately we arrived in Agra without any serious delay. If you have seen Slumdog Millionaire you probably noticed the crowd of guides offering to take people through the Taj Mahal, it's not an exaggeration. We had barely stepped from the car before getting accosted by a troupe of guides, offering to help us get through the queues and "go over The Taj with a fine-toothed comb." On Boodu's suggestion, we enlisted the help of one of the guides, Emron, to get us through the line. Tickets to enter The Taj were 20/- for Indian nationals, and 750/- for foreigners. After buying our tickets, Emron asked 300/- of us to bribe the officer at the gate. If we hadn't already paid 40x the price for a ticket of everyone in eh 2 1/2 hour line, my conscience may have grated me a little. To get in through the "VIP Entrance" we took a detour around the side of the Taj, walking around back alleyways and up shadowy stairs, I was half convinced we were going to be the victims of some kind of organ-harvesting scheme. Once we arrived at the gate, kidneys securely in place, we had no problem in getting through the gate. Emron told us some interesting facts about the Taj Mahal; it took 22 years to build it, and along with the gardens on either side, the monument is perfectly symmetrical with the burial site of the third wife of Shah Jahan directly in the middle. Gems are embedded in the marble of the building, flush with the surface. The marble is translucent and supposedly glows slightly in the moonlight. The four minarets around the central building are angled 2 degrees out from the middle, so in case of an earthquake the towers will fall safely away from the monument, rather than crush the resting place of Jahan and his wife. After Jahan built it, he intended to build a second, smaller twin monument on the opposite side of Yumana river. His son disapproved of the expenditure, and locked Shah Jahan in the Agra Fort, where he lived the rest of his life.

The Agra Red Fort isn't a bad place to be locked away. Overlooking the city and across the Yumana from the Taj, the Fort has a central field which would be fantastic for some Ultimate Frisbee, dozens of good-sized rooms, and a massive stone bathtub. Mosques are found around the Fort, where shoe removal is required. This was very typical of many places we went during this weekend. We didn't have our shoes on, or had shoe-covers on, for most of the Gandhi Memorial, the Taj Mahal, the mosques in the Fort, and another mosque we crossed through to Karims.

Sunday morning we attended the creation of the New Delhi 4th Branch, which was split off from the first and third branches. The church has rented the basement, 3rd floor, and roof of a building in Delhi, and refurnished it for church use; well, mostly refurnished. The roof still has a stage and a bar, and could work for some really great branch activities. After church we crossed off a few final things in Delhi, such as the Bahai Lotus Temple and the Presidents House. Although it is called "The Presidents House" a different name, like "The Presidents Compound" may be more fitting. The parliament building is visible from the complex, where the two primary parties, Congress and BJP resolve their differences, sometimes in words and occasionally in blows. With August approaching, preparations are being made for the traditional military march from the Presidents Home to the Red Fort commemorating the declaration of Independence on August 15th, 1947.

There was some turbulence on the way back, but our plane got us back in BGL on time in spite of circumnavigating a large storm, and I crashed into bed at 2:00 this morning, glad to have kicked back one layer of residence, and a short 2 weeks away from the next kick. These upcoming weeks are going to have a lot of activity, with something going on almost every day. I have a lot of pictures from Delhi & Agra, which I'll be uploading soon, so watch that little slideshow on the right.

Midweek Post:

Cisco took the TAC team for a "team-building activity" yesterday, after bin hours, we left for Indijoe's, a multicuisine buffet place where we ate way too much, took pictures, and generally just had fun. There was a variety of Indian food, in addition to some different breads, pastas, deserts, and a few types of meat. They even had some pretty good buffalo wings! After everyone ate all we could, we went to Ezone for Go Carting. The carts were like gas-powered bumper cars, and the course was built with tires piled 3x deep, it was a TON of fun. Each race had 6 carts, and was done over 5 laps. I think the funnest part of it was taking the turns really fast: since the carts had such a low center of gravity they would fishtail around the curves. This also puts you in poor contact with the ground, and makes you more susceptible to getting pushed around by the other carters. One bump pushed me into a pile of tires where I had to wait to get pushed back into the course, putting me a full lap behind the rest of the carters. I'll get Venkata back for that somehow.

Week 10:

This weekend was relaxing in that we didn't travel outside of Bangalore, but busy in that it held a fair number of activities. A friend at work, Shankar, introduced me to another guy here at Cisco that plays ultimate frisbee! This may not sound strange to most people, but it's hard to find people that have even thrown a frisbee before, let alone played a game of ultimate. Throwing it around outside for an hour or two generated some interest, and pulled in another 3 people, almost enough to get a game playing. I later joined a bunch of guys from pretty much every team on TAC this weekend for some soccer, food, and cruising around the outskirts of Bangalore. It's amazing how good rural areas smell after being in the stinky city for a while.

We *finally* got paid for the previous pay period, and went to the bank to cash our checks. If you thought US Bank hours were bad, they are even nastier here: 10:00AM to 3:30PM. The area was similar to a bank in that there were tellers, and desks where people were applying for loans, but in every other way different. The tellers sat behind a thick pane of glass, where they did business with patrons through slot at the bottom. Security officers walked around in the room with old double-barreled shotguns, while workers carried tens of lakhs of rupees around the room in plain site for one reason or another. I would think that they would try not to inspire people to do anything stupid, but walking around with more money in one's hand than most people make in a year is just daring some kid to see if he could outrun a shotgun blast.

Saturday evening I went out with some friends to Hard Rock Cafe downtown, met a bunch of new people, had good food, and enjoyed the western music. HRC here is a lot like those you'd see in the United States, with a menu changes. There are localized foods that taste distinctly Indian, and a lot more vegetarian options.

Completely unrelated India/Networking note: the StarCraft II Beta is back online! The internet at my apartment is unreliable and pretty slow, so I decided to stay late at the office and play for a few hours. SC2 partner/former roomate/general dumpface Chris refused to get up earlier than 9:30, so we didn't get started until after 9:00PM my time. I figured that rather than take the risk of walking home past midnight I'd just spend the night here! There's a gents-nap-room I slept in, and a shower in the bathroom so I was able to rinse myself off with a bit. Even so, spending almost 36 hours on campus straight probably isn't something I'd like to do again soon.

LAN/WAN was a great experience. I learned more about some of the intricacies of switching, and how to figure out if problems are software or hardware related, which can be very difficult to diagnose at times. The mysteries of higher-level switches are now open before me, I know what makes a good switch, a bad switch, and why different switches are better at different types of traffic. A guy on the floor had his birthday this past week: for the party there was a cake, singing happy birthday, a candle, etc, then the party took a turn for the worse. Two guys picked up the birthday man by his hands and feet, and everyone took turns giving "bumps," aka kicking him in the butt. Some people were really ruthless! It probably still hurts him to sit down. Evidently this tradition is even more painful in home parties, where they break out cricket bats.

The TAC floor is a lot more social than working in the lab, since there are so many more people. After "bin hours" where the engineers are actively taking calls, people will get together and play some games, mess around with rubiks cube, or just chat. I found out that I can beat everyone on the TAC team in an arm wrestle except for one, I'll get you some day Dumesh, I really will.

This Friday morning we leave for Delhi. Most of the plans are in order, only thing left is to make sure we have a way to get to the airport in the morning. Our contact in Delhi, Boddu, has done most of the arrangements for us, including a day-trip to Agra for the Taj Mahal. More on this and pictures of the trip to come.

Week 9:

We got the assignment change this week! I'm now hopping from team to team in TAC, getting training, shadowing support calls, getting engineers to teach me about their respective technologies, and trying not to be a nuisance everywhere I go. Tues/Wed we received some formalish training from Shyam and Rajeshwari of the Architecture team. As the training went on I discovered that BYU does a pretty good job of preparing us with knowledge that can be universally applied. Classes in IT and CS made it a lot easier to pick everything up, especially concepts of process scheduling and memory management in Operating Systems by Professor Teng and the concepts taught in Networking by Prof. Ekstrom. The modern IT workplace really is a hydra of technologies, most of which we get some exposure to at BYU. Occasionally I wonder, as I'm sure every student does, if my college education has been worth the time and money spent. Attempting to approach this internship sans formal education would have been incredibly difficult. As it is I feel that I've been exceptionally prepared, and I still have another year of classwork!

This week we'll be joining the LAN/WAN guys across the floor. I've been able to spend a little time with them before and some of the projects they work on are huge in scale: WAN links spanning over a dozen devices and multiple ISPs. It'll be fun to see what problems companies of this size run into, and how the issues are resolved.

Bandh (Strike) Update

This morning we came to the office at 7:00, a little earlier than usual to avoid any strike activity and help work on lab audit preparations. There was practically no traffic, and much less activity on Cisco campus. Krishna Rao, the head of TAC in India with whom we had the opportunity to have lunch last week, called a meeting to address the issue of the strike. He said that if things appeared to be calming down everyone would be allowed to leave the office at 2:00. Unfortunately, since then most large cities in India have been "heating up," as per a recent update, but Bangalore has been one of the calmer cities, due to proactive police measures in establishing 35 platoons of "bandobusters" around the city. Here's a few things that have been going on around the country this morning:

• Pune, Patna, Lucknow & Varanasi top BJP leaders have been court arrested by police. These arrests are rooted to lathi charge.
• As of now all metro cities in india bandh turns to violence.
• All flights to Cochin, Mangalore & Mumbai canceled from Chennai.
• 15 Buses attacked in Pune by protesters.
• BJP Protesters rush to Bangalore and Mysore Railway stations to stop rail services.
• Flights canceled to Bangalore from Chennai.
• 04 BMTC buses have been attacked by protesters in Lokesh nagar.
• Banks, Schools, IT Offices and shops bandh in Bangalore.
• Two Buses stoned on Tumkur Road near Madanayakana Halli.
• A stray incident of quarrel between a shop owner and CPI(M) workers at Srinivaspura in Kolar Dist over forcible closing of shops. CPI(M) Worker injured.
• 35 Platoons of police deployed across Bangalore.
• Stone pelting on BMTC buses in Rajaji Nagar.
• Woman welfare associations come forward to support the bandh in Bangalore.
• BMTC and KSRTC services has been called off by Transport Minister Mr . Ashok till 06:00 PM.

Week 8:

My last post spilled over a bit into this week, but I'll try to elaborate a tad on the CCNA experience. Over the past month our manager Badri Krishnamurthy has been helping me prepare for the test by introducing us to people in the specific fields of technology that are found on the CCNA, such as wireless, routing, switching, etc. Most of my preparation has been by using TestOut Labsim or reading Todd Lamle's book, but this kind of training was much more enjoyable. Not only did we go over the material, but we got much more in-depth knowledge than we could have otherwise. Some concepts we covered on a CCIE level, far outside of the scope required for the exam at hand. Coming to these people for CCNA training was akin to asking Warren Buffet for advice on how to manage your piggy bank. Thanks to these experience support techs and my other studies I passed the exam this past Monday, renewing my certification which had lapsed 3 years prior.

With the Cisco internal audit approaching many people are becoming anxious about the state of the lab. Compared with other TAC labs the Cisco lab is in great shape. It isn't a model of cable management, nor is it absolutely perfect in inventory management, but we do a great job of ensuring that we know what is in the lab and who is using it. As should be expected, Cisco is very strict on their internal audits, and the team wants to be absolutely prepared for it. The result of this is a part-time extension of our current assignment. A few hours of every day will be spent in helping the TAC lab admins either with the recreate requests or helping ensure the lab is in the required condition. If you've followed my blog, you've read how manpower is readily available in the country. I've learned that Cisco has a team of "boys" that can be called upon and set on any task required, such as reorganizing the store room, which Sagar has been overseeing.

Last weekend was a great experience, but it left me wishing for a day off. This weekend provided that. Saturday I went out with my friend Swetha, who showed me some more parts of Bangalore and helped me find some things for my family I was looking for. Family, pretend you didn't read that, it's supposed to be a surprise. We grabbed some lunch at a subway where I ran into a friend from 2nd branch, who is preparing to go into the MTC in September. For a city of six million people, running into people you know happens with a strange frequency.

Sunday also has been a very relaxing 4th of July. Fast & testimony meeting was great, we got to hear from the new mission president and his wife, President & Sister Funk. The teacher had prepared a lesson on the psalms; a collection of quotations from the book which we took turns reading, explaining how we felt about them, and saying which hymn the quote reminded us of. It was a different kind of lesson, and a fun activity. It prompted a lot of discussion, most of which was relevant.

Tickets have been booked for our 3-day trip to New Delhi, in which we'll be seeing the Taj Mahal in Agra, the cremation site of Mahatma Gandhi, the Presidential Home, the Lotus Temple, along with many other sites. We'll be leaving the morning of the 23rd, and returning the 25th of this month.

In closing, there has been a 3-rupee increase (6c) in gas-taxes, which has prompted BJP, the ultra nationalist political party, to call a general strike across the entire country. From what I understand, the BJP stands little to gain from this other than some popularity of siding with the people against the decision of the Congress Party controlled government. We're not talking a Gandhian hunger-strike here. Strikes in modern India consist of all shops being closed down, rioting, transportation coming to a complete halt, and people setting alight tires and anything else that looks flammable. Several companies have given their employees the day off, especially if they have to travel a long distance to get to work. Since we are so far away from the center of the city, and Cisco practically next door to us, we'll still be going in to work. If I'm lucky maybe I'll be able to see some of the stuff going on! On the other hand, I don't like gas prices going up either, perhaps I'll go join them, feel some riotous camaraderie, roll a flaming tire down the road for a belated 4 of July display. Sounds like a blast!

-Scott