Now sure how serious this is!. They are planning on renaming Bangalore to Bengaluru. That’s how you pronounce Bangalore in Kannada.
Link : Bangalore to be re-named Bengaluru (and here)
This is what the above article says…
Chief Minister N Dharam Singh told reporters in Gulbarga on Sunday that he had asked the chief secretary to take steps for renaming Bangalore.
He said Kannadigas were calling the city as Bengaluru but taking an Anglicised form, it became Bangalore.
Dharam recalled that a suggestion to call the city as Bengaluru had emanated at a meeting of prominent Kannada litterateurs he had called recently to seek their views on celebrating the golden jubilee of the formation of the state of Karnataka.
Well, if this is true, then Bangalore would be the 4th major city in India to undergo a name change. First it was Bombay to Mumbai, second was Madras to Chennai, third was Calcutta to Kolkotta.
So, would the next one be Bangalore to Bengaluru ?
Personally, I strongly feel that the government should give more stress to important matters related to development, infrastructure, rural reform etc. It should not get into overheads like these. Renaming Bangalore to Bengaluru wont make the city any better.
My friend Harsh asked me, ……. Is Mangalore next ? Since it sounds like Bangalore. But, in case of Mangalore, renaming wont be that simple I guess. Why ? Its because, Mangalore has different names in different languages!
In Kannada, its known as Mangaluru (like Bengaluru)
In Konkani, its known as Kodiyal
In Tulu, people call it by the name of Kudla
Malayali people use the term Mangalapuram!
And since Kannada is not what majority of people speak in Mangalore, I seriously doubt it would be called Mangaluru. (i.e., if and when it would be renamed!)
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December 11th, 2005 at 11:20pm
We are all set for our trip to Tirupati tomorrow. Around 16 of us from our family would be part of this trip. We would be going by two Toyota Qualises. The plan is to start early morning at around 5.30 AM, have breakfast at Hassan, and lunch at somewhere near Kolar. As per our schedule, we would reach Tirupati tomorrow evening.
Total distance between Mangalore to Tirupati is around 642 kms (398.92 miles).
i.e., Mangalore to Bangalore is 357 kms + Bangalore to Tirupati is 285 kms.
So, its going to be quite a lot of travel. If everything goes as planned, we should be back by monday.
Will try to click some good snaps and post it here.
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October 28th, 2005 at 10:50pm
I find that lot of people search for customer care numbers of various Indian banks and services. So, here is a small list. Hope this would be useful for all. Will try to keep this updated. If you find that any of these numbers don’t work, or have a alternate number, please leave a comment.
- ICICI Bank Customer Care Number
- Bangalore - 4113 1877
- Karnataka - 98455 78000
- For other cities, click here. Phone Banking workflow click here.
- Citibank Customer Care Number
- All Citibank customers - Bangalore - 2227 2484. For other cities, click here
- Citibank Suvidha account holders - Bangalore - 2227 2265. For other cities, click here
- CitiBusiness Customers - Bangalore - 2229 4653. For other cities, click here
- Citibank Credit Card - Bangalore - 2227 2484. For other cities, click here
- Priority service to CitiGold Customers, Diners Club Members & Citibank Gold Card members - Bangalore - 2229- 4653. For other cities, click here
- HSBC Customer Care Number
- Banking related - Bangalore - 2558 9595
- Credit card related - Bangalore - 2558 9696
- For other cities, click here
- HDFC Customer Care Number
- Debit card related - 9945863333
- Banking related - Bangalore - 5500 3333. For other cities, click here
- Credit card related - Bangalore - 6622 4332. For other cities, click here
- ABN AMRO Customer Care number
- SBI Credit Card Customer Care Number
- Karnataka - Bangalore -
98441 05454 (people are reporting that this number does not work. If you know a number that works, please let me know!)
- All India Toll Free - 1600 180 1290 (works only on BSNL and MTNL Line)
- Try : 1800 180 1290 too. May work!!!
- Other lines : 39 02 02 02
- UTI Bank Customer Care Numbers
- Bangalore (M G Road) - 2537 0615
- Bangalore - 2531 7830
- Mumbai - 022 5598 7700
- For other cities, click here
- IDBI Bank Customer Care Number (Phone Banking)
- Karnataka - Bangalore - 080 22297000
- Mumbai - 022 66937000
- Delhi - 011 23627000
- Chennai - 044 28295550
- For other cities, click here
- Manhattan Credit Card Customer Care Number
- Bangalore - 3030 1969. (this number seems to work in Mumbai too! Give it a try in your local city!)
- Standard Chartered Credit Card Customer Care Number
- Bangalore - 2558 8888 (updated). For other cities, click here
- Deutsche Bank Customer Care Number
- 6601 6601 (this number is available in Aurangabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolhapur, Kolkata and Mumbai. If dialing from Gurgaon / Noida please prefix 9511 before dialing.)
- Airtel Customer Care
- Dail 121 from your airtel mobile
- Karnataka - 98450 98450 - For prepaid if you are calling from landline
- Karnataka - 98450 12345 - For postpaid if you are calling from landline
- Hutch Customer Care
- Karnataka - Dial 111 from your Hutch phone or dial 98860 98860
- BSNL Mobile Customer Care (Cellone & Excel)
- Karnataka - Dial 94480 24365
- For other cities, click here.
- Reliance Mobile Customer Care
- Call 3033 3333 Or dial *333 from your Reliance Mobile
- For other numbers, click here.
- Reliance Broadband Customer Care
- Call 022 - 3033 7777 Or dial *377 on your Reliance phone
- SpiceJet Customer Care
- From BSNL/MTNL : 1800 180 3333
- Others (GSM/CDMA): +91 98718 03333
- LIC Policy Details (Life Insurance Corporation)
- Call - 1251 or
- New Delhi 011 - 2332 9595
- Mumbai 022 -2612 5555
- Kolkata 033 - 23341765, 23211893/94/95
- Chennai 044 - 28602626/28602929
- Hyderabad 040 - 2329 7455
- Bangalore 080 - 2248 5210
- Pune 020 - 2553 6161
- Ahmedabad 079 - 2550 7777
- Yahoo! India Customer Care
- I am not sure if these numbers work, but give it a try & leave a comment!
- Bangalore : (080) 39805078
- Chennai : (044) 39119494
- Yahoo! US “Customer Service”: 1-866-562-7219 (for yahoo.com)
- Yahoo! Small Business/Store: 1-866-800-8092
- Other US Yahoo! numbers to try
- +1 866-850-4303
- +1 866-562-7228
- +1 408-349-1572
- +1 408-349-3300
- +1 408-329-5151
- +1 800-318-0631
If you feel some service is missing and would be useful to list, drop a comment.
Last Updated: 15-Jan-2008
Please note:
If you find the above information useful and would like to display the above information on your website/blog, I would appreciate a link back to this page with appropriate credit. Please give credit where credit is due, specially if you decide to copy/paste the contents!
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September 19th, 2005 at 11:51pm
Yesterday Google quitely updated Google Earth’s image resolution of quite a lot of cities. This update also included Mumbai (Bombay), Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore. Cool.
Seeing the images, it looks like these were taken around a year back!
Here is a mini-bangalore sightseeing using Google Earth! (You must have installed Google Earth on your machine to view these files)
I could also see the Infosys Campus in Electronics city!
You can download the full tour of places listed above here.
The same is the case with Mumbai. Now the Gateway of India is pretty clear. Mumbai looks great. Don’t miss the Marine drive area!
Enjoy!
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September 18th, 2005 at 12:43pm
Got this one as a forward. Not sure who the original author is. If you know the original author, please let me know, so that I can give due credits!. (Update: Its by Jagadish)
This one is real hilarious, funny, and very close to reality - atleast for people in IT field, in Bangalore.
“….yavaag foreign ge?” (For non Kannada folks….this means when r u goin to foreign)
The familiar sentence is arguably one of the most frequently asked questions, losing only slightly to the even more grave one “…yavaag maduve?” (when marriage?) to someone who unluckily happens to be in the IT Industry and in Bangalore. There was never a better conversation topic for the older generation to suck every drop of blood the poor bloke manages to save despite working as a techie.
It’s a wave that everyone wants to be part of, and everyone wants to show they know. The word computer is now a house-hold name. A good relief for many topic starved aunties and uncles, but our poor techie gets stuck like a nail that’s half into the wood when its head decides to painfully break lose.
The popular following that IT has gotten in recent years has been more due to the lucrative travel, than what the techie believes is due to his work. This time it is the uncles who have the upper hand in making a conversation, owing to some ‘extra’ knowledge, thanks to ‘external’ contacts. Aunties resign to just asking “…yenappa computer aa?” (literally means “are u a computer?”, but it is supposed to be “Are you working in the IT field?” One must be ready to field a volley of smirks and barrage of questions, if the victim answers a “no”, though it would be the right answer for such a question. For if you are not part of the bandwagon, and then you’d rather term yourself a foolish old crackpot and be happy with that, than get a loathsome look from the omnipresent aunty.
IT has such a popular following here, most do not know what they are following, but just drift along to be ’seen’. Our aunty gets into her form, and asks our techie, “you computer, my son also computer” …our techie, just out of a ctrl-alt-tab-enter, has no idea how to respond to this inhuman portrayal, by the aunty, of her son. He just smiles and says “wonderful aunty, which company?” and is hardly interested in what he hears. The aunty carries on. ” nun maga sapoo”…the indianised MNC becomes “sapoo” from SAP, while our techie replies back, “I work for GE”.aunty is a bit concerned on hearing that, and blurts out “is it a good company ? didn’t u get in infosys ?”…techie is at his wits end to explain; aunty is in no mood to understand. aunt’s techie son is blushing ear to ear.
while the general social understanding of an IT company hovers between Infosys and Wipro, some good souls give respect to “Vorakal” too. So aunties are generally happy if one is from any of these companies. The other companies will only mean a detailed interrogation about the techie’s academic credentials, past criminal record, if any, and a sure minus point as a prospective groom.
It is the conversation between aunties that is the funniest and amazingly astonishing. Recently one of my cousins went onsite, and I being the scape goat, who still ‘had’ to be in India, was the butt of all discussions.
aunty1: “foreign ge yaavaga ivnu hogodu?” (when is he going onsite?)
aunty2: “gothilla, innenu swalpa divsdalley hogthaaneno” (He might go in some days!)
aunty1: “hmmm…they say only brilliants (sic) are sent onsite”
aunty2: “that’s true!”
I was being murdered inch by inch, neat and clean. My reputation in tatters.
This is even bearable, but get this, if a techie manages to stumble on an onsite travel but is cancelled on that last millisecond, and then his future is doomed, for aunties will have a field day dissecting him and nailing him for not working well at the office. I have been most unfortunate in this case, so much so that if I had got a call to abort the travel 2 seconds later than what I got, I might have had to jump off the plane mid-air.
aunties started flowing in from early evening that day, some trying to stay oblivious of the situation, some trying hard to keep a straight face, and a few more giving their own versions of my story, which by the way I never told anyone!…well one aunty even had the nerve to ask me “did you have a fight with your manager?”. well I was kind enough to say “no aunty, project got scrapped “, only to realize that the aunty had no idea what a project meant, and instead pressed me to agree that I had indeed done some mistake…finally she let me go when I blurted out “my manager had a fight with the airlines”….well that was enough for me to roll over on the floor and laugh at her, despite the ‘humiliation’ of not going onsite.
uncles are not far off, and are ever more eager to learn ‘computers’. One uncle was particularly curious to know as to why we guys were paid for playing computer games !…apparently he was of this view after he had seen his 9 year old son only playing games on his newly bought comp. I knew better than to explain, so I told him that it was because if we won, the company would get money. uncle’s spirits rose, and in all probability he would have gone home and pestered his innocent 9 year old son to teach him to play games in the hopes of joining a IT company in future !
uncles are a little more “knowledgeable” though. One uncle came to me one day, when I made the suicidal mistake of attending a social gathering full of aunties and uncles, and asked me as to which company I worked for, and I answered him hoping he would stop there. however , uncle had no such intention and carried on ” yaav language ?”…though stunned, i replied back “c sharp uncle” …uncle’s face glowed and then he said ” nun maga Java , c# bidhoithanthey!” (My son works on JAVA, C sharp has long fallen from grace) ..In most uncles view, languages are like company shares, the value of which keeps fluctuating on an hourly basis.
Though salary is something of a sensitive issue, uncles don’t give didly-squat about that and continue questioning the techie on the same. I was ripped apart when i told my uncle that my gross was 25k, to which my uncle in suspended euphoria exclaimed that his son earned 2.5 lakh per month at onsite. Having no room to argue, i kept mum, when my uncle went off again “why don’t u ask your manager for a raise”…. I told him i would consider his advice and ask, though my manager was bit of a dragon, unlike my uncle’s son’s manger, who was a saint just short of a halo!
Even weirder is the funny way in which people take those mails managers send to techies and their team, as to the good work being done. one of my cousins who recently joined my company got such a mail from his manager, and he thought it was a good idea to take a print out and show it to his father, a folly he still regrets to this day. My uncle not only read the copy, but made a hundred photocopies and distributed it as pamphlets to his near and dear ones. My dad got one too, and i had to field some intense questioning at home, since i had not managed to get one such letter even once ! i had even gone to the extent of thinking about printing one on my own just to escape the ‘humiliation’.
while it’s often funny to listen to the weird misconceptions people have about IT, it gets irritating if it goes too far. It would be a boring place without the aunties and the uncles, but it would be a wonderful place, if they knew better than to draw conclusions about one’s work, of which they know so less about !
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July 25th, 2005 at 06:56pm
