Google I/O Extended, Bengaluru (2023)Archived
A watch party in a Google office, three hours from home, and a night in a railway station because I planned the going and never the coming back.
For anyone in Bengaluru this is a Wednesday evening. For me it was 100 kilometres, three hours on a bus, and the first time I had ever been to the city.
The mail came on the 9th. Google I/O Extended Watch Party, RMZ Infinity, Old Madras Road, 7:30 pm to 11:30 pm on the 10th.
Getting there
Left very early. Reached by afternoon. Ate at a roadside place near the office.
Then I was at Google hours before doors opened, and there was nowhere for me to be. Their policy is their policy, and you do not get to sit inside a Google office because you turned up early. So I waited outside. Scrolled. Walked around. Came back. Waited again.
I did not know a single other place in the city to go to, so I stayed near the building.
In
7:30 came. They started check-in, and the organiser walked over to me and handed me my badge first, because he had watched me sit out there the whole afternoon.
Inside was food, a hall filling up, and a lot of people who all seemed to already know what they were doing.
One of the first people I talked to was Jeevan. He said he was an MLSA, and I nodded like I knew what that was. I did not. Later I found out it stands for Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador, and through the same conversations I heard about Google Developer Student Clubs for the first time.
That is the actual thing I took home. Not the announcements. The fact that these programmes existed at all, and that people my age were already in them.
The keynote
This was the year Google said AI in front of everything.
Every product, every announcement, the same tag on all of it. Watching it in a room full of people reacting at the same time is not the same as watching it alone on a laptop, and that was the point of being there.
11:30 pm
It ended, and I walked out into the part I had not thought about at all.
I had planned how to get to Bengaluru. I had not planned a single thing about getting back. No return ticket, no place to stay, no idea which bus went where or when the last one left.
What I did have was Hemant.
He and his friend came out to meet me, and rather than leaving me to work it out alone in a city I did not know, the three of us went to the railway station and slept there for a few hours. They were travelling that night as well, so the wait was shared.
Their train came around 4 AM. They went home, and after that I was on my own.
I walked to Tin Factory and waited for a bus. One came through that ran along the Kadiri road, and my hometown route crosses it, so I got on, took a ticket, found a seat and slept. Got down partway and caught another bus to Madanapalli.
The cold and the mosquitoes did the rest. I was sick for nearly a week.
What it actually taught me
Not a Google announcement. This: if you plan the going, plan the coming back too.
Every event I went to in Bengaluru after this one, I worked the answers out first:
- When to go, and where exactly to go.
- When the buses to my hometown come through.
- When the last one leaves.
- Where to get on.
- What to use, and how to use it. Ola, Uber, and Google Maps read properly rather than trusted blindly.
None of that was obvious to me before this night. All of it was obvious after.
I went on plenty of trips to Bengaluru after this, for different events. Those ones I planned properly and executed properly, and I went and came back without any of this. That is what I learned here.