Fi al-madinah al-qadima

We went for a walk in the Old City of Jerusalem today entering through Bab al-Amoud (Damascus Gate). The present walls around the old city were rebuilt and restored by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman in 1537. The weather here is sunny, brisk and invigorating and there were a lot of people out today on Saturday. The entrance to Bab al-Amoud was crowded with hawkers (vendors). Inside the old city there were a few groups of European tourists and quite a few locals out shopping.

Technical writing in Bengalooru

My technical writing friends in town out did themselves today and set up several very informative visits. First I met Helen and Rakesh Shukla of The Writers Block, a technical communication training and consulting company with offices in the neighborhood of Bengalooru called Domlur. We had a very pleasant and informative visit at their place of business and I was able to meet two of their technical writing instructors and several students as well.


Then I went over to Oracle in Lexington Towers, in Koramangala, another part of Bengalooru, for a larger meeting. We were 30 minutes late arriving. The driver of the car I had hired for the afternoon had for the second time overestimated his knowledge of the streets of Bengalooru. The building was one of those big new glass and marble towers that we have come to expect in IT land. It is one of three Oracle facilities in town. It had the typical security with ID cards and cube-land working atmosphere inside.

I first met with Gururaj, B.S., an experienced technical writer who manages a team of four at Oracle. In addition, he maintains TWIN, the premier India list for technical writers. We visited for about 15 minutes until I needed to prepare for my presentation.

In a comfortable meeting room I spoke to a group of 20 technical writers, about half of whom work at Oracle and the others came in from companies like Intel and FaceTime. The meeting was largely organized through STC; Susan Alexander, one of the STC members, was kind enough to present me with a certificate of appreciation.



The audience had numerous questions, many having to do with the details of Minnesota State's online offerings in technical communication. I also got several more questions about pedagogy, as it turns out that several of the audience not only are practitioners, but also instructors of technical writing. The system in India really is quite different from ours. Here practitioners are instructors and practitioners learn in private institutes like TWB or on the job training.

I would like to thank Kumar Dhanagopal, a principal technical writer at Oracle, for arranging my visit on such short notice.

more on autos and incomes in Bengalooru

I have heard autos referred to as rickshaws also. I associate rickshaws with British colonial times. My memory tells me that they were pedaled rather than motorized. According to my friend Abdul Shakour who took me to Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens today, there are about 1 million of these fellows driving around the city looking for a fare.

He says that he makes about 600-700 Ns. daily (13.33 USD to 15.55 USD) and spends about 200 (4.44 USD) of that on LP gas to power his rig. He says that they have 200 cc motors. He says that he gets a three-year license (I have forgotten the amount, but he told me.) He said he had been a car taxi driver prior to being an auto driver and interestingly, he told me that driving a car taxi is less profitable due to the higher overhead.

These autos have meters. Some drivers say right away, "on the meter" when I ask how much the fare will be. Others want to negotiate right away. That is when my 9 years of negotiating skill, gained living in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, kicks in. Additional sources of income for the auto drivers are advertising placed on the autos and, as I discovered, agreements between drivers and souvenir shops to deliver foreign tourists to have a look at the goods in the shop (all done with a smile).

These vehicles are highly maneuverable and it seems from what I have seen at night, tail lights are optional. They carry goods and people both, sometimes at the same time. They compete for space on the streets with motorcycles, motor scooters, and motor bikes. There are a few buses and cars around too.

A little about tech writing in Bengalooru

Rajdeep Gupta, a successful tech writer here in town and assistant organizer of the Bangalore TechWriters Meetup, was nice enough to spend his lunch hour with me and answer some of my questions about the state of the profession here in Bengalooru.

We discussed the training that tech writers go through here, the types of jobs that are available, and the effect of the world-wide recession on the profession here. Rajdeep was curious about the attitude of westerners toward tech writers and their work that is outsourced from the U.S. to India.

Rajdeep said several interesting things during our discussion:

• Thirty percent (30%) of technical writers working in Bengalooru, in his opinion, are software programmers who have gone over to writing more than programming. These writers are paid more money that the other 70% who have a language background rather than a programming background.
• Private institutes that offer training for technical writers tend to run 2 or 3 month training sessions. These institutes tend to be "tool heavy." In the parlance this means that they emphasize training on software that writers use such as Adobe Robohelp for creating online help systems or Arbortext for XML editing more than writing training.

I am curious about the accreditation of educational institutions here in India. The following article on page 5 of the Times of India caught my eye today.

Since I do not understand the educational system in India, however, it is difficult for me to draw any conclusions about the way this finding revealed in the article might reflect on the technical writing institutes here in Bengalooru.

Note: Perhaps one of the folks more knowledgeable than I who is following this blog could help us out here in the comments.

...and then off to Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens

I had agreed to meet Abdul Shakour at 10 a.m. but hadn't decided on a destination. We left at 10:30 and headed for Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens. I didn't know what to expect, but it was worth the trip. The flower exhibition had just finished up yesterday, but there were a lot of flowers still available for viewing. I enjoyed the "Have Peace, No War" flower-covered globe.



To the right, is a view from the top of the gniess rock outcropping at the entrance to Lal Bagh Botanical Garden. The city of Bengalooru can be seen in the background. A very cute young couple agreed to take my photograph. The young man was kind indeed to take time away from his very pretty fiance to wield my camera.


We found numerous elementary school groups on outings to the botanical garden. On the way back we stopped at two stores that sell nicely made Indian crafts and souvenir items. I did well to resist buying much (well, I did get one small piece.)

Cubbon Park visited

I got to Cubbon Park by auto (rickshaw) this morning and enjoyed 45 minutes of walking there. The auto driver delivered me to the entrance at Gopalagowda Circle. MG Road is at the other end of the park, so I was able to walk right through about 2 kms. and find myself on the way back to the hotel.

A theme in this posting is signage since I was able to get some photos of signage that is unusual in the eyes of someone from the midwestern U.S. The Gopalagowda Circle sign, for example, is much more ornate and colorful than we expect traffic signs to be.

Second, the sign in Cubbon Park that explains activities that are verboten is also interesting.

Note: If you double-click the sign you can enlarge it and read the sign clearly.

Do you understand what is meant by "Playing" is forbidden? It seems to refer to loud music. As for "Hawkers", that means no selling stuff in the park. "Hawkers" is a British English term, but we understand it in the U.S. No "Feeding the Dogs" is obvious and I will say that there were numerous dogs in the park hanging out in packs or individually. They all seem to be of the same mongrel breed. And finally, I guess that "Illegal Activities" means whatever you want it to mean. The sign is bilingual, of course, since English is the one language that all Indians have given the large number of indigenous languages spoken here.

Finally, I bring you a third type of signage showing six of the species of birds found in Cubbon Park. The beautiful hand-painted illustrations give a very clear way to identify those birds. I found several of these signs in the park. This sign uses repetition (both illustration and written information)--together, the visual and the textual help us to achieve the purpose of the sign.















Bougainvillea is gorgeous so I had to photograph some along the way. I found it just outside the park along MG Road.

to Cubbon Park

I hope to visit Cubbon Park tomorrow. By all that I have heard and been able to learn online, it will be a good place to run and enjoy the greenery. It looks like I can go out to MG Road (Mahatma Gandhi Road) and take it all the way to the park.

Transportation in Bengalooru is interesting. There seem to be many more motor bikes, motorcycles, and "autos" than automobiles. The three-wheeled covered motorbikes, or rickshaws, have a seat in back for passengers and are LP-gas powered. The ones I have ridden in are 4-speed, 2-cycle, and I would guess have motors of about 400 cc. They are rear-wheel drive.

Republic Day in Bengalooru

I just got back from the Field Marshal Manekshaw Parade Ground in Bengalooru. It is located about a mile down MG Road. The security guys wouldn't let me take my camera in, so I don't have any of my own photos, but the guy sitting next to me took some photos with his phone, so I may get one of those from him.

Republic Day celebrates the day in 1950 when the country finalized its own constitution. Independence Day is August 15.

About 9 a.m. a helicopter dropped red confetti on the parade ground and the assembled marchers made up of various military and police units. That was followed by the speech of the governor of Karnataka, the state where Bengalooru is located. His speech, in English, lasted about 30 minutes.

Following the speech, the marchers paraded around the parade ground in front of the thousands of citizens watching from the stands. (Watch a short video from the parade ground on YouTube. It appears to have been filmed this morning.) The final group of marchers was a military band. All in all, it was a very colorful event and I got to visit with the two young men sitting on either side of me. One is an electrician and the other a programmer. Pradeep, the programmer, has a 3 year degree and a letter of employment from Wipro, a local IT ompany. Because of the recession, he has not actually started work yet. His salary, he said, should be about 22000 Ns. monthly, or about 488.00 USD.

Below is the Republic Day greeting in today's Times of India. The headline reads "Sovereignty, Peace and prosperity-the spirit of the Republic of India. The photograph on the right-hand side is of B.S. Yeddyurappa, the Chief Minister. He sends his "Hearty Republic Day greetings to the people of Karnataka", the state in which Bengalooru is located.

Bengalooru here we are...

We arrived in Bengalooru (Bangalore, Bangaluru) early morning on a flight from London.

"The name Bangalore is an anglicised version of the city's name in the Kannada language, Bengalūru. The earliest reference to the name "Bengaluru" was found in a ninth century Western Ganga Dynasty stone inscription on a "vīra gallu" (ವೀರ ಗಲ್ಲು) (literally, "hero stone", a rock edict extolling the virtues of a warrior). In this inscription found in Begur, "Bengaluru" is referred to as a place in which a battle was fought in 890. It states that the place was part of the Ganga kingdom until 1004 and was known as "Bengaval-uru", the "City of Guards" in Halegannada (Old Kannada."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangalore

I have continued to read Friedman's The World is Flat. We'll see how his thesis holds up as I meet technical writers and IT people here. Friedman did a lot of his interviews here in 2004 and 2005. He is clearly a cheerleader for the efficiencies that the IT industry has found in moving jobs to the locations in the world where the work can be done most cheaply.

My initial reaction to the sights, sounds, and smells of this place is that it bears some resemblance to Africa's largest city, Cairo, where I lived for some time.

Tomorrow is Republic Day in India. I hope to watch a parade here in the city. From TAJOnline: "26th January 1950 is one of the most important days in Indian history as it was on this day the constitution of India came into force and India became a truly sovereign state. In this day India became a totally republican unit. The country finally realized the dream of Mahatma Gandhi and the numerous freedom fighters who, fought for and sacrificed their lives for the Independence of their country. So, the 26th of January was decreed a national holiday and has been recognized and celebrated as the Republic Day of India, ever since. "

I just went for a walk on MG road. A young man asked me the location of a certain disco. I told him that I was a visitor and had no idea and wished him and his friends good luck with meeting some girls tonight.

HSK in pictures

In between the raindrops on January 23, I took a few photos around the HSK campus in Karlsruhe. Interesting to note for those of us from MSU, Mankato, is that the campus is park-like, but located in an urban environment. Students ride bikes, take the strassenbahn (street car), and walk. They don't have the bitter winter weather to content with like we do. When I ran in the morning there I noticed the ground was frosted, but just barely. That was coldest I found in Karlsruhe.

Note: You should be able to enlarge the photos by double clicking them.

The technische redaktion (tech comm) department is located in Gebaude F (see photo above).

The front entrance to the university is on the main street (see right).


Below, the park-like campus.