I’m visiting my friend KM and his family in Bangalore (aka Bengaluru) after many years. The weather in this city is better than any other major Indian city’s. If I were to live in India, I’d choose this city. I took the picture above from the 15th floor apartment in a development called Brigade Gateway in Malleswaram — it has everything that you’d need: residential towers, school, hotel, mall (Orion), hospital, mega store, parks, gyms, restaurants, office complexes, etc etc.
In the picture above, on the right is the office building which houses, among others, the headquarters of Amazon India. You can tell it’s a commercial building because it has the garish fluorescent lighting usually found in warehouses and shop floors. The other major building in the picture is a modestly sized Sheraton Hotel. The color temperature of its lighting — mimicking incandescent light — is much lower compared to the Amazon building’s lights.
I abhor fluorescent lighting. For reasons I don’t understand, nearly everyone I know in India simply loves tube lights and compact fluorescent lights. The other thing I can’t stand is lighting from the ceiling. I prefer rooms to be lit at eye level — which means many lamps around the room, instead of a set of lights stuck to the ceiling. Ugh. If you find yourself in a hotel room with fluorescent lights stuck to the ceiling, you are probably in a flea motel, not the Sheraton.
The other day a friend told me he prefers fluorescent lights because they are brighter than the other types. Well, other lights can be bright too. The intensity of a light source is a different matter than the temperature of the light. A 20 watt incandescent bulb is rather dim compared to a 8 watt CFL. But a 200 watt incandescent bulb will be blindingly bright in a room.
Anyway, I am giving up my fight against fluorescent lighting in homes. I tried for 20 years and failed to make them see the light.
Moving on — I will get to answering the questions that followed the recent AMA. For now, here’s an old post that I’m sure you’d like: Tubular Belle.
Addendum: KM reminded me that the complex has a school as well. I have added that.
Life is a Random Draw 
Expressing love for incandescent lamps is the new form of Macaulayism!
Here’s the impact of the American love of “warm light”:
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/noah-horowitz/swapping-out-last-15b-incandescent-bulbs-us-homes
Engineers should be well aware that white LED light can be trivially turned “warm” using colored filters or diffusers. So you can have your carbon credits and eat it too!
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