I've seen some bumper stickers in my time. Typically they boasted about windsurfers doing it standing up or small-bore rifle shooters doing it laying down. But seeing a car sticker amidst the hurly-burly of Bangalore traffic saying "Eschew Obfuscation" sums this place up. These Karnatakans are crazy. It's certainly full on but a fascinating place to be and time to be here.

Take our office. AOL have two floors in the same building and WalMart do something on this floor. Across the road a massive engineering project is trying (and by all accounts failing) to build an elevated roadway. In the shadow of the construction site are tin-shacks with washing strung between them. On the next block is TGI Fridays and half a mile up the street the insanely luxurious Leela Palace hotel. Round the corner the cows "graze" on the street in front of the mobile phone shop. It's all going on.

Between us runs Airport Road, a solid mass of traffic like some automotive dry stone wall. It's as if some master mason has taken the large vehicles, the buses and vans, distributed them around the road and filled in all the gaps with progressively smaler "stones": cars, auto-rickshaws (henceforth reffered to as autos), motorbikes, scooters and bikes. The end product is a solid mass of traffic through which brave pedestrians must take their chances when they come.

The traffic and the attendant pollution seems to be the biggest drawback. Taking an auto into the centre of town today we choked all way on the fumes as we crawled through the gridlock. It's not a pretty picture. Otherwise the weather at least has been very pleasant. So far we seem to have been spared the worst of the monsoon that's bringing floods to Maharastra in the north. It's been overcast most days, about 30 degrees, but with quite a stiff breeze that makes the outdoors (and away from the road) most agreable.