I returned from India on Sunday, after leaving Bombay at 420am, a two hour layover in Dubai, and then a 16 hour flight back to San Francisco. Of my two bags, one was lost and at last check Emirates doesn’t know where it is yet. Well played Emirates, well played. I managed to get 10 hours of sleep in last night so we’ll see how the jetlag goes.

On my flight from from Bombay to Dubai, I was on the same flight at John Abraham, who apparently is some huge Indian movie star. I had no idea who this guy was except there was a crowd of men and women flanking him everywhere he went. I was in the boarding line with him and the only way I figured out who he was was by reading his name off of his boarding pass and then Googling it.

I left Bangalore on Friday and spent the weekend in Bombay with my sister and my grandma in Santacruz. On Friday night we went to this place called Escobar(great name, eh?) to hang out with and meet my sister’s friend. Quite fun.

Spending time in the Bangalore office reminded me a lot of the first few trips I took to the Microsoft Shanghai office in 2005. The team is full of energy, excited and eager to work on cool technology. I love getting to spend time with motivated and excited engineers. The office there is full of talent and I hope to be able to mke it there a few times this year. It’s almost alluring enough to make me want to move there for a while. I also had a chance to give a tech talk on Packager for iPhone to the teams there, which was also great.

I’m in Bangalore this week to work with our engineering team here. That’s worth a post on it’s own at some point (tons of job related stuff that I should get around to posting). What I wanted to post about how incredible it is to get all the way out to India from the states, and the incredible complexity of travel this far. Our flight from San Francisco, on Emirates, was delayed four hours since the arriving flight from Dubai had not made it in yet. Since there was a huge delay, we ended up missing our connection in Dubai that would have taken us on to Banglore, thus we stayed in the Dubai airport for six hours waiting for the next flight. Made it to Bangalore Monday ~8am, an hour and a half ride later we were at our hotel then went on to the office.

Bangalore is a pretty impressive city. For one it feels a bit more progressive than other Indian cities I’ve been in. I was last in India January 2009, in Mumbai. The streets are quite clean, and there’s signage everywhere that says “don’t drink and drive” (in English). In fact, at this one round-a-bout, there’s a (for lack of a better word) sculpture of a guy who hit a tree on his scooter that says something like “don’t let this be you.”  There are apparently four subway lines coming to the city, with one supposed to be opening this year. Given how bad the traffic is here, that should be a godsend. It takes us ~30m to travel the ~5km to the office. Yikes.

We’re here working with the team to design a bunch of the major components of the product that will be made here (again, I should blog on the latest job news) and to kick off our next few sprints. It’s fun to work with energetic thinkers and spend time brainstorming on the whats and hows of our work.

I’m here till Friday, when I leave for Mumbai to spend the weekend with my sister. From there, it’s back to the states on Sunday.