After a pair of long flights, I've arrived home to a Northern Virginia teetering on the brink of Autumn. The weather's gorgeous here and I'm so glad to see the family. All three girls have grown perceptibly in my absence and the youngest is now a full-on toddler, walking all around the house.

I'll be taking a couple days off, playing with the kids, running the Army 10-Miler this weekend, and then returning to the old routine, which seems remarkably alluring given my international travels of late. I'm hoping my efforts in India bear fruit and my team there will succeed. Some day, in the not-so-distant future we'll all wonder what the big deal was about outsourcing, internationalization, and working across timezones. By then we'll have gone to South America and then to the old Soviet Bloc in search of talent, I imagine.

The single-most depressing part of traveling to Bangalore is the international arrivals area at the airport. Here's the Wikipedia entry for the Bangalore Airport, which is, in my opinion, a scandalous and crumbling gateway to the "Silicon Valley of India."

The current unfinished state of the International Airport sentences the business traveler to five more years, at least, of grim and crowded travels through Bangalore. Join the watch and visualize the completed airport.

Start Date:October 2002, June 2003, September 2003, November 2003, December 2003, June 2004, Jan 2005, Feb 2005, April 2005, July 2-2005

End Date:2003, Early 2005, Mid-2006, Mid-2007 [27 months], Jan 2-2008

Caution: All dates are slippery when wet.

One redeeming quality is the lack of the non-flying population inside the aiport itself. "The entry of visitors into the Terminal is on the basis of paid entry tickets." This cuts down somewhat on crowding and makes one's emergence from the airport a parade, whereby the bed-head and rumpled clothing of the bleary traveler are displayed for all to see.

I've got a ton of photos from the trip and a few of them should bubble up here to the front page, so watch out for that.

Technorati Tag: india