The city I am in, Bengaluru, is known as the ‘Silicon Valley’ of India. It is obvious why it has that name when you drive through the city and see the many, many Technoparks that exist here. I may not be using that term exactly right, but what it means as a first time visitor to Bengaluru is that there are groups of very modern office buildings that house mostly IT companies from around the world. I can’t think of a single large technology company that I have not seen represented here….Cisco, HP, Dell, even saw a company name that used to be well known in St. Louis, Savvis.

My firm has its offices in three different Technoparks in the city. A Technopark building is similar to many US office buildings, with a slight difference. Most of the Technoparks are gated, when your driver pulls in, the gate opens, a guard may or may not look in the trunk of your car, then they let  you in. Once in the Technopark grounds, you have pretty much everything you need to work the day. Besides the office building itself, there is usually a common cafeteria in the main building and there are small shops outside the office building to do minor shopping during lunch / breaks. There is a small pharmacy, coffee shop with free wi fi and a couple restaurants. Both Technoparks I’ve been to have US pizza chains, Domino’s and Pizza Hut. I’ll write more about their pizza later – funny stuff!

Because of the design of the parks and the fact that traffic is very, very heavy, most workers do not leave their respective Technopark during the workday.Similar to tax folks in the US, teams work late in the day. To balance their work life with fun, there is a cricket league that many companies in Technoparks participate in. Here is a link to information about the league: http://technopark.crickees.com/

I will have the opportunity to see some of the EY teams in this league play cricket this upcoming weekend. I am really looking forward to it — an American colleague of mine told me that she thought cricket was like baseball, except when you hit a foul ball, you get to run anyway. Funny statement, maybe I will understand it more when I see them in action.