Every morning a cab would come and take me to work. Due to horrendous traffic, the 7 mile ride took anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour. This gave me plenty of opportunity to stare out the window and observe the daily life of the city.

As the picture tries to show, Bangalore architecture is about extremes. Beautiful brand new office buildings punctuate streets of run-down sheds. True to local custom, the owners of the shiny buildings don't particularly care about their neighboorhoods, or even their own portals. As an extreme example, I'd seen estates where the inside of the fence surrounding the property was nice and shiny, while the outside was rotting away.

The only constant is road quality. It's completely deplorable, even by Hungarian standards. According to locals, corruption and huge kickbacks are as much to blame as simple lack of funding. There is also a lack of roads, new enormous apartment complexes and office buildings are going up all over the city like mushrooms, with no road construction to help people get to or from.