Thursday 23 February 2012

Indian Fawlty Towers

I am currently in India at the ISEC 2012 Conference held at the IIT in Kanpur. The IIT is one of the most prestigious in India and has an impressive campus outside the city centre. Kanpur is famous for the massacre of English soldiers and civilians that occurred as part of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Apart from that, the city seems to be a bit of a dust-bowl.

India is a delightful place to visit and I would recommend the ISEC conference which has a great mix of delegates from Indian Universities and IT Companies. However, one has to be careful in terms of hotels. The very excellent Taj chain of hotels provides a level of accommodation and service that exceeds more expensive hotels in the UK. Unfortunately, Kanpur did not have a Taj hotel and we decided to pass on the opportunity to stay at the IIT, put off by the name 'Visitors Hostel' that turned out to be a delightful oasis of calm, and instead opted for what we thought would be a Taj equivalent. Amazingly, we appear to have found the equivalent of Fawlty Towers right here in India. The glory days of the rooms and facilities were decades ago and the staff seem to have been trained by Basil himself.

Conference presentation is below.


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