I was eating lunch at the Google office in Bangalore, India.

"You look familiar," said the engineer across the table from me. I suggested that he might have watched an archived video of a talk I'd given. "No, that's not it," he said. We continued with our lunch. Fifteen minutes later, he mentioned he once lived in Madison, Wisconsin. I mentioned I had went to school there. He said he did as well, as a grad student for two years. He recognized me because I was a coordinator for the Undergraduate Projects Lab.

I've read, maybe, the first third of The World is Flat (I found the book needlessly verbose, geared more for someone knowing little about technology and globalization), but the beginning of the book talks specifically about Bangalore. This was part of my interest in coming here. It feels as if large, imposing, metallic office buildings have dropped from the sky to accompany the similarly airlifted shops among the older buildings: grand and elaborate homes, shacks, seedy shops, and neglected and garbage-covered vacant lots.

Interestingly enough, I found a copy of The World is Flat in a bookstore in the Garuda Mall.

But what struck me most was that while, outside the office, the environment was exotic and foreign (walking along the uneven slabs laid down as a sidewalk and dodging the chaotic stream of cars, scooters, and autorickshaws when darting across intersections), inside the corporate confines, I might have well been working in a office off University Avenue in Palo Alto. Before leaving, I had copied my files to Bangalore, and, when I got there, I sat at an empty terminal, logged in, and was just as productive as I would be in my chair in Mountain View, California (and more productive in my dealings with the other Bangalore engineers, being able to spin around in my chair rather than send an e-mail and deal with the time difference).

Anyway, the next leg of the trip is a flight to Delhi (I'm actually finishing up this post in my hotel room), and then visits to Agra (to see the Taj Mahal) and Chandigarh (to attend a coworker's wedding).