No significant change is expected.....

As a young lad growing up in Bangalore, I was an avid reader, eagerly absorbing every word I could find in print. Whether children's novels like Black Beauty or classics like Gone With The Wind, or my textbooks, or magazines, newspapers and periodicals, or my father's law books. My dad, being just as assiduous a fan of the printed word as I, subscribed to all the English-language daily newspapers available in Bangalore at the time: The Deccan Herald, The Indian Express and The Hindu. Of course, I read each from front to back, not omitting the ads or the classifieds. That habit has led to my reputation as the repository of useless facts and trivia.

One of the regular daily contents of each paper was the weather report, dutifully provided by the Weather Office of the Meteorological Department of what is now the Ministry of Earth Sciences. I was greatly interested in the weather conditions in various parts of this vast country, and eagerly tracked and compared the high and low temperatures and the rainfall in various parts of the country, developing a fondness for the cooler parts of our hot land. I read the Observations in The Deccan Herald's weather section, which was a recounting of the general weather yesterday in the state of Karnataka, or Mysore as it was known until 1973. I distinctly remember the one component of the weather report that absolutely never changed. It ran thus:
Outlook for subsequent two days: No significant change is expected over the State.

You could take that to the bank, you could depend on it when rumors of war swirled, you could count on it to cure you of your insomnia, you could rely on its assurance when various groups threatened to wreak violence across the state, you could take comfort in it when wayward satellites threatened to drop onto your head: no significant change was expected. It was the rock in our ever-threatening-to-change world. The Met assured us that no significant change was expected. It didn't matter that one day was sunny and bone-dry, and the next a thunderous, lightning-filled, hailstone-crashing flooding day. No significant change was expected.


A few years later, I left the country, but I returned periodically for various reasons. On every return visit, I would scan the newspapers as of old. Things were changing in India. Prime Ministers were being assassinated. Religion riots were creating schisms between neighbors and old friends. The country went broke, and pawned its gold. The old socialist mold was broken from sheer necessity, and a tentative capitalism instituted in its place. The West discovered that it needed India's proficiency in archaic legacy programming, and hundreds of thousands of English-speaking Indian programmers hit the jackpot of highly remunerative work overseas. India saw its first dollar billionaire. The word "Bangalored" made it into the English lexicon. India became the back-office to the world. Through it all the Met assured us, via its daily weather prognostication, that no significant change was expected over the state.

On this, my latest and longest visit to my formerly naturally air-conditioned hometown, I developed a bit more of a civic consciousness, a bit less detachment for what goes on in the governance of this erstwhile garden city. I think more about the cleanliness of the neighborhood, I consider the services being provided, I observe the gauntlet of corruption that Jayanth Q. Prasanna must run for everything from his motorcycle registration to buying a new flat. I note that the city administration, which goes by the acronym of BBMP(Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, which means, as far as I can figure it, the Greater Bangalore City Administration, or something to that effect), has tremendously increased cash flow with all the new construction, business, permits, etc. So have the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board(BWSSB) and the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company(BESCOM). Not only that, they have made it extremely easy to pay them, with 24-hour kiosks, web payments, automatic deductions and such. They go so far as to say that they have world-class billing systems, and they are not far off the mark. They even charge near world-class prices. What isn't world class from these entities are the services they provide, which are as abysmal, if not more so, than what I remember from over 30 years ago.


First up, BWSSB. This eminently self-congratulatory utility(see their website) loses a full 50% of the 925 million litres per day that it claims to pump into the city, and it has no clue where that water goes. Indeed, I read a couple of weeks ago in The Deccan Herald that the BWSSB officials admit that they don't even have a complete map of how pipes feed off their water mains. That is to say, they don't know where the water goes unless the customer applies for a water meter. Add to that the dismal quality of the water that actually reaches the consumer(I mentioned this in another post) which requires secondary treatment at the consumer's home or business to be made fit for human consumption, the intermittent, uncertain and ultra-low-pressure supply, and one wonders at the accolades that BWSSB claims to have received. I truly believe that, back in 1975, we had better quality water at a decent pressure with greater delivery reliability.


Next, BESCOM. This power distribution utility, which seems to have been spun off from the Karnataka Electricity Board(KEB), inherited a wobbly, inefficient, unreliable system from its parent, and has remained true to its DNA. In the best of times, typically November through January, when the reservoirs are full and the rains are not shorting out the transformers at every sub-station, power failures may occur once a day, unless there is "scheduled maintenance", which gives you another period without power. Mercifully, the weather is relatively cool and very dry during this time, which means you don't really need a fan or an air-conditioner. But as the weather warms from February on, so do the transformers, and power outages become a regular, if unpredictable, occurrence. Approaching thunderstorms also apparently trigger pre-emptive shutoffs. I haven't been here during the monsoon time in many years, but if past experience is any guide, it only gets worse. But BESCOM too has instituted world-class billing practices, and it is quite easy to pay your bill. As for world-class service, it apparently values filial loyalty more, and continues the legacy of the KEB that Bangaloreans knew and disliked so much.


Now we come to BBMP, the successor to the Bangalore City Corporation. Like its corporate cousins, BBMP has instituted world-class billing and payment systems- no, I take that back. It has attempted to institute world-class billing and payment systems. It is certainly easier than of old to get your bills and to pay, but it is a bit short of being world-class. The reason I had to qualify my assessment is a personal experience with property tax. I would go into that a bit more, but I want to save space for other observations. Also like its corporate cousins, BBMP values family loyalty above all else, and has preserved the BCC tradition of doing as little as possible as late as possible as sloppily as possible. The only actual improvement I see in the city is the institution of door-to-door garbage collection, which has rid the neighborhoods of the unsightly and stinking concrete barrels where each street would dump their household refuse. Often, these were in front of someone's house, and I cannot imagine how that household got through each day without retching constantly. Now, of course, the less civic-minded of Bangalore's denizens, apparently unaware of BBMP's door-to-door collection and still seeing the old barrels in their mind's eye, seem to wander around with their plastic bags of trash, like bees laden with honey who return from the fields to find their home tragically missing, finally chucking them into empty lots, fenced-off electrical sub-stations, gaps in the sidewalks, storm drains, concrete highway barriers, construction sites and so on.


But back to ye BBMP. The idea that a city- and one that apparently aspires to be a world-class city- needs to have good roads, clean neighborhoods, walkable sidewalks, clean air and such, never appears to have disturbed its thinking. Bangalore used to be, in relative terms, a clean city. There actually existed, at one point, several roads without a single pothole. Now, potholes are de rigueur, storm drains overflow with sewage, sidewalks have giant gaps(or have been turned into garden extensions and parking spaces by homeowners), power lines and all manner of cables droop over the street and sometimes actually drape themselves on the sidewalks, trash is burned all over the place, construction material is permitted to spill onto the streets and the sidewalks, streets are being turned one-way rather than fixing the traffic-engineering problems, and there is little sense of governance.

 I watched a spot at the intersection of Old Madras Road and 80 Feet Road in Indiranagar, where there are traffic lights. On both the eastbound and westbound sides of OMR, as soon as the light turns green and the traffic starts to move, it is immediately brought to a crawl as vehicles negotiate the giant potholes. This causes even more traffic headaches, since traffic that is piling up behind cannot move, even though they have the green. The whole idea of traffic management is movement. Fixing this issue is, in any other country, or perhaps even in other Indian states, an overnight solution. You bring in a crew during the night, close down one side of the roadway, patch and roll the potholes in an hour, switch to the other side, repeat, and you're done. Traffic the next day would slide right through. But the BBMP says that even if they wanted to, they couldn't, because they have no money. If you don't have the money to fix potholes on major roads in several years, then surely you don't have the money to spend on unnecessary "improvements" which benefit the friends of city councillors?

Believe it or not, this was a light-traffic day, late on a Saturday afternoon. The potholes are behind the scooter stopped to the side. You can see the two-wheelers and smaller four-wheelers slow down and bounce over the potholes. And yes, it is that noisy!

So here's the situation: Bangalore is growing, but it isn't getting any better. We have water shortages, power shortages, potholed roads and horrendous pollution. The city looks like a war zone with missing sidewalk slabs, construction debris all over the place, haphazardly placed traffic barriers, trash everywhere you look, and a general appearance of decrepitude. So, what is the outlook for BBMP, BWSSB, BESCOM, BDA, et al, to get their act together and make Bangalore a livable, world-class city? In the immortal words of the Met Department: "No significant change is expected....."

How India's biggest mobile operator rips off billions

A few months ago, I acquired a pre-paid mobile account from Airtel, the largest mobile operator in India with 210 million customers. I'd used Airtel before, with mixed results, but using post-paid accounts. On the mobile account, I had no problems to speak of. On my data plan, they continued to bill me for a month after I had terminated it. Terminated it clearly, to the point where one of their reps called me to try to persuade me to keep it. I told him I was exiting the country, and he was trying to talk me into a reduced data plan(I had an unlimited plan at a claimed 256 kbps, with actual speeds of 30-40 kbps). I had the devil of a time getting him to understand that a data plan in India did me no good when I was living on the other side of the world. I got gypped out of Rs.1100($22) for the next month, which came out of my deposit. Moral of the story: never let Airtel keep any more of your cash than you absolutely have to. They will find a way to steal it.

So I get this pre-paid mobile account, and load it up with a goodish amount, since I intended to use it quite a bit. My usage is strictly voice, no data and no outgoing text messaging. I thought that with a pre-paid plan, when it came time to leave, I didn't need to hassle with their customer "care" people. But I hadn't reckoned with Airtel's usual practice with pre-paid accounts. A couple of weeks after I got it, I received a text message which said something to the effect of "Thank you for using XYZ service. Rs. 5 has been deducted from your account". Never having encountered this before, I put it down to some error, or perhaps some errant message intended for someone else. And it was only Rs. 5(10 cents), so I wasn't too perturbed. The next day, I get the same thing, and then the day after. I called up "customer care", and they insisted I had subscribed to a "value-added service". I told them I use the phone for nothing else but voice, and that the day I got the first message, the phone had been sitting quietly in front of me on the desk for several hours. I hadn't so much as picked it up in my hand, and(I told them) I don't subscribe to anything. After some back and forth, they told me I needed to "unsubscribe". I said, why would I need to unsubscribe when I never subscribed in the first place? What I needed for them to do was rectify their error. Finally, after conferring with a couple other people, the guy told me he had unsubscribed me, but it could take a couple of days to take effect. In reply to my question about the money deducted, he said he couldn't make a refund. I was told that I could request an itemized bill via e-mail, but what they didn't tell me was that my account would be debited an additional Rs. 50, just for the privilege of knowing when and for how much Airtel had ripped me off. At this point, they had taken out about Rs. 120. So I said(to myself), "(Expletive) it, I'm not going to chase after $2". It took 2 more days, and another Rs. 10 deducted, before I was "unsubscribed".

A week goes by, and I get another text message thanking me for subscribing to some sort of movie trivia service, and again takes 5 bucks out. This time, I called right away. The customer "care" people did anything but care, but I finally got them to "unsubscribe" me, without a refund, of course. At this point, I was wondering how much Airtel might be making from this scam, and how many people they do it to. I began researching complaints on the web, and found out that Airtel has been doing this since at least 2007-and possibly since 1995(the year it was founded)- and has generated a massive flood of complaints. TRAI(the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) has totally ignored the fraud up until the present day. Not surprising, since the Mittals, who founded and own a large chunk of Bharti Airtel, are dollar billionaires(#113 on the Forbes 400 list), icons of the rising India, and politically extremely well-connected indeed. I find that Airtel has 210 million customers, with about 10 million of them being post-paid accounts. Based on my experience, and the complaints I read, I estimated that on any given day, Airtel was ripping off a minimum of 5-7% of its pre-paid customers, or between 10 and 14 million. It was(and is) harder to estimate the average amount of the ripoff, since Airtel has a variety of "value-added" scams going on. On the low-end, it is 2-5 Rs., and it could be as much as 30 Rs. a day. So I think a figure of Rs.8 on average is reasonable, especially given that I have been generous in my low assessment of 5-7% victims, since many of them are ripped off for days before the hemorrhaging stops. So, at Rs. 8 per day for, let's say, 12 million customers, Airtel garners Rs. 96 million a day, or Rs. 35,000 million a year, which is about $700 million. That represents a very, very healthy 45% of the Rs. 76,782 million($1.5 billion) profit before tax that Airtel reported for 2010-11. In short, 45% of Airtel's profits before tax are stolen from their pre-paid customers without their knowledge or approval. Or, to put it another way, Airtel paid their taxes of Rs. 16.7 billion with stolen money, and got an extra Rs. 18 billion in pure play-money, just from pre-paid accounts. They presumably wrangle another couple of bucks out of their post-paid, landline and internet customers. This has been going on for years, and my very conservative estimate is that it totals well over $2 billion. Not chump change, by any yardstick.

So a few weeks go by, and I get comfortable, thinking I'm not on Airtel's scamming radar anymore. Then, I get hit again, this time for something called "VOV", hitting me up for Rs.5 per day again. This time, I "unsubscribed" over their website, without a refund, of course. Now, I'm getting really mad, and I decide that the next time I get one of these things, I'm going over to the Airtel office(the main one), and demand to be allowed to pick the pocket of whichever executive I see. I mean, fair's fair, right? Airtel is reaching into my (virtual) wallet and helping itself to cash, so I don't see why I shouldn't be able to do the same thing to their people. I would love to do it to Sunil Mittal himself, but I wouldn't be able to get within a mile of him. It doesn't matter how little the amount is for me, it's the principle of the thing, and the feeling of being violated. Again, about 3 weeks after the VOV heist, Airtel hits me again, this time for "KANNADA MOV MMS_2". I don't know what this is about, except that it seems to involve Kannada movies. I am not a fan of Kannada movies, or of Indian movies in general- which seem unable to get out of the song-and-dance/drama/violence/pathos/silly-comedy combination routine that has marked the Indian movie industry for at least 80 years- and I am now thoroughly p.o.'d. Okay, crunch time, Airtel! I'm coming to pick your pockets!

Update: I got Airtel to permanently take my number off their "Value Added Services", and I haven't been hit again in the past 6 months or so. If you have been hit with the same issue, I suggest you visit their regional office, and firmly ask to pick their pockets as a quid pro quo. In the meanwhile, my housekeeper- who laughed at me everytime I threw a fit(she's not very up on my slang, but she gets the gist!) when Airtel "enrolled" me in a new scam and said it never happens to her- asked me to download some of my music onto her cellphone. While I was doing that, I also updated her phone software, and while I was explaining to her how the new-look interface worked, I noticed she had a couple of notifications from Airtel similar to what I'd been getting, but for less, like 1 to 1.5 rupees a day. She admitted she'd been getting this for months, but hadn't understood what it was and would promptly delete the message. She apparently hadn't noticed that her balance was going down by that amount every day from this deduction, putting it down to her usage instead. I'm sure Airtel has tens of millions of similarly challenged users, and it's like taking candy from a baby when they scam a dollar a month off each of these millions of users. I've told her what to do about it, and hopefully she will follow up.

Update: I just found this post, which details Airtel's latest moneymaker:
 http://ajithprasad.com/airtel-smartbytes-scam/

When time is an abstract concept

One of the things that bothers me most, living here in India, is how time is valued. Or, rather, how it is not. Nobody ever seems to be on time, not the tradesman, not your business appointment, not the help or anyone else you can think of. Specifying a time for an appointment or for starting a job seems to be but a kindly suggestion, much like the "Follow traffic rules" signs in Bangalore.

In particular, I am peeved right now because of how much time I have lost over the past few days, not only because people haven't kept their appointments, but also because they haven't had the courtesy to communicate the delay and/or the cause for it. Everyone seems to think that you have endless hours to wait on them. The worst of it is when you schedule a broad swath of time, say between 10 AM and 5 PM, for someone to show up and do some work, and you have set aside other tasks to accommodate this. And 5 PM comes and goes, and nary a phone call to say, "Sorry, but we aren't able to make it today". Well, not quite the worst. The worst is when they don't even call you the next day, and you have to call to (a), find out why they didn't show up and (b), re-schedule on your own initiative. Gee, having my money in your pocket does give you a whole new outlook, doesn't it? I'm learning to avoid even the smallest deposit prior to work being started, but that doesn't work when you need stuff delivered which you've already paid for, or installation is included in the up-front price.

And then you have friends/businesspeople with whom you schedule lunch at 1 PM, and they show up, without an apology, at a quarter to two. I mean, it's not a party. Everyone has a cell phone, but it doesn't seem to occur to them to use it to communicate their tardiness. The only ones who show up on time seem to be expats. You order a piece of furniture, on the assurance that it will be ready in 7 days, and on day 8, of course you have to call them because they haven't delivered and they haven't called. Then they tell you that they will deliver in two more days, and of course it will be two more weeks before they actually do. I've even been to banks at their appointed opening hour, and had to wait because they weren't quite open. Cabs are either early(probably hoping they can start billing you unexpectedly) or late, which makes you late for other things as well. Letting your cab driver go for an hour lunch is a huge mistake, because he rarely gets back within an hour and a half. Everything you do has to be done with allowances for tardiness which, at the end of the day, means you got less done than you intended to, which is frustrating when it's a regular occurrence.

It's hard to find humor in this wholesale disregard for the value of other people's time. I used to laugh at the description of IST as "Indian Stretchable Time", but it is difficult to keep quite as sanguine an attitude when the "stretching" really messes up your day, every day. Come on, people, get with the program!

Giving trash a pass

Bangalore has, over the past few days, had the dubious pleasure of witnessing a brouhaha between the BBMP(the city administration) and the IPL(the richest cricket league in the world). Peering through the fog of battle, it seems that the BBMP was miffed that no VIP passes were handed out to its officials, and that IPL only gave them 250 free general admission passes. The fallout(pun unintended!) was that trash began to pile up around the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, home to the Royal Challengers Bangalore(RCB) team. Rather than give in to the BBMP's corrupt demand, the IPL decided to hire private garbage haulers to take away the trash, upon which the BBMP threatened to follow and fine the private haulers if the trash was not taken to "approved sites". Never mind that the BBMP thinks that the "approved site" for the trash it picks up on my street is a vacant lot on the next street where it is regularly burned, or that its failure to perform a contracted service would result in a very serious public health hazard.

Today, the trash pick-up lady didn't show up for her usual door-to-door pick-up. Not relating this in any way to the BBMP-IPL spat, I asked the housekeeper if she knew why. She tells me that the lady, who is middle-aged, given to hitting the bottle during the course of the day and, to all appearances, oblivious to the world of cricket, has taken the day off to enjoy today's fixture at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, courtesy of the IPL. No doubt, she- along with the rest of the city's sanitation workers- will excitedly cheer on Chris Gayle, the star batsman of the home team. RCB are known for their hospitality, and perhaps will offer her a pint of Royal Challenge whiskey to make for an even more exciting day.

All's well that end's well, the saying goes. The trash will no doubt be cleared by BBMP after tonight's game, and we will have our local trash lady back at work tomorrow. In the meanwhile, there's a lesson to be learned: you can't fight city hall, even when the corruption is overt and outré.

What atheists are missing

There's an op-ed in today's NYT which echoes a lot of the sentiment I have with regard to atheists. I think atheists miss the boat when they dismiss religion wholesale, and actually become the mirror image of hardcore religionists when they refuse to consider any positive aspect of religion, just as religious fundamentalists refuse to countenance any questioning of their precepts. But rather than write a whole lot on the subject, I will excerpt some parts of the op-ed, and leave you to read the rest on the NYT website.

“The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many aspects of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed,” - Alain de Botton, author of "Religion for Atheists"

“Organized religions preside over the rites of passage, from birth to maturity, from marriage to death. Beliefs in immortality and ultimate divine justice give priceless comfort, and they steel resolution and bravery in difficult times. For millennia, organized religions have been the source of much of the best in the creative arts.”  - Edward O. Wilson, Harvard biologist

Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, also focuses on the unifying power of faith in his new book, “The Righteous Mind.” Haidt, an atheist since his teens, argues that scientists often misunderstand religion because they home in on individuals rather than on the way faith can bind a community.

“The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship,” Haidt writes.

You can read the entire op-ed post here.

Can Indians innovate?

There's an article in the Times of India today on the possibility of Bangalore being "Bangalored". An interesting article which lists many of the factors that are causing Bangalore(and India) to lose its edge. One comment in particular, by Srini Raju of Peepul, is apt. He says that the innovation that is required for India to move up the IT value chain is hamstrung by the lack of sacrifice and hunger that characterizes breakthrough innovation. That's a tough betelnut to swallow, to mangle a well-known phrase, but there is more to it than most Indians would like to admit.

Innovation thrives best when you have an environment that encourages and rewards it. I find that there is still too much in India that throttles individuality, that punishes a free spirit. In order for India Inc. to find the spirit of innovation, the societal fetters need to loosen up. All day, every day, one hears and reads nonsensical comments which belong to the 16th century, not the 21st. They come from politicians, religious leaders, policemen and ordinary people. One person, commenting on a promise by an Indian actress to strip if India won the cricket World Cup(I guess she meant for a magazine shoot), said that western female emancipation "degraded them to the status of concubines, mistresses and society butterflies". No doubt the depictions of female nudity- and more- on Indian monuments of antiquity were foisted on us by perverted western suffragettes, A perfect example of the Indian tendency to deprecate others from a false moral pulpit. Mostly, these comments tend to celebrate and reinforce an argument for the social status quo, which is like making an argument for running with a flat tire.

Now what would a blog be if the blogger didn't go off-track somewhere in his post? Here's my off-track moment:

/begin off-track moment
Years ago, NRIs in America would boast of how everything was recycled in India, from plastic bags and broken buckets to tin cans to paper and cardboard. They would brag of how cars, appliances and electronics were endlessly recycled by clever Indian craftsmen, reducing the need for carving giant canyons out of the earth. The point of it was to make(to the westerner) a virtue out of (Indian) necessity, and deprecate the uncaring westerner polluting the earth with tons of inorganic waste while portraying Indians as culturally natural stewards of the environment, reality notwithstanding. Fast forward 20 years, and the same NRIs are bragging about disposable this and that being available in India, of urban trash landfills that can rival those in the west, of the apparently insatiable Indian appetite for consumer goods, and so on. Somewhere in between, the moral superiority of being good stewards of the earth seems to have been stood on its head. How convenient, and what a hypocritical about-face!
/end off-track moment

But there's a lot more to the spirit of innovation than knocking down societal prejudices. Another aspect that needs to be assiduously cultivated is the spirit of workmanship, the ability and desire to give of one's best, no matter what the job at hand. That, sadly, I have not been able to find in India thus far, but hope springs eternal. Almost everywhere, I encounter the mindset of "good enough", or the "local" mindset. Even relatively simple problem-solving seems to suffer from whatfor-itis, occurring whenever those responsible for resolving problems don't take responsibility. If consequences for irresponsibility, sloth and mediocrity are not rendered, then the spirit of innovation suffers. Poor performance needs to be dealt with harshly, and good performance suitably rewarded. It begins with cleaning up our physical environment, just as a clean house or a clean factory is stimulating. Indians need to not just demand performance from government, via letters to the editor or "morchas" and such, but get legally aggressive. That missing slab on the sidewalk in front of your house? Send a legal notice to the BBMP, and make them accountable for consequences. Have to truck in water because the water utility didn't supply you water for a week? Send the bill to them, along with a legal notice, to be adjusted against future water bills. Silted-up storm drain overflowed into your house and polluted your underground water storage? Sue the BBMP for costs. Power surge blew out your refrigerator compressor? Have BESCOM pay for repairs or replacement.

Once the general mindset no longer reflects "chalta hai" or "swalpa adjust maadu", it frees up the collective thought process for innovation and change. And a clean environment moves the thoughts along better. As long as Indians continue to accept the status quo ante, innovation will be held at bay.

UPDATE:

I thought I'd post a concept vs. execution picture of the MG Road Metro station. On the left, you see the concept, clean, edgy and satisfying. On the right, the completed station, looking crude, half-baked and messy. Even the track pillars are more suited to a rural aquaduct than urban architecture.

Another "thought" from me after I encountered a problem. I was trying to find an address in central Bangalore, and ran around in circles, almost literally, doing so. When I came home, I looked it up on G-Maps (see map below). This is typical of the lackadaisical way everything is done in India, without a thought for logic or consequence or usability. 1st Cross Road feeds into 3rd Cross Road, 2nd Cross Road angles off 1st Cross Road. 2nd Cross Road is between 3rd Cross and 7th Cross. 8th Cross is perpendicular to 7th Cross. There's no 4th Cross, or 5th or 6th Cross. And there's a lone "1st Main Road" that looks orphaned. There is no sequence or directional logic. This sort of street layout isn't unusual. Bangalore is full of similarly confusing layouts. It just makes you wonder, "Wtf were they thinking?".

This one below is from a visit to the Karnataka government website. I was trying to get a handle on the atrocious "Stamp duties" and associated fees. Every link on the right side connects to some sort of private waster water treatment website. You'd think that someone, anyone, who had anything to do with the Karnataka government website design would have done some basic navigation to test the links. The lack of functional links renders this completely useless. Do we need to wonder why Indian software contractors are generally overseen by a more competent westerner?