My first impression about Bay Area is that it looks like a mosaic of post-industrial wasteland interspersing unending sprawl peppered with preppy downtown districts, all sun baked and connected by enormous amounts of tar. The endless lanes of black tar that connect virtually everything to everything are constantly polished by a multitude of cars that zip by at all times of the day.
Bay Area of course is more than what I mention above. It is also a Mecca of technology – the home of Silicon Valley. There are parts in San Jose and Milpitas where technology companies line both sides of the street. Often times driving in Bay Area seems surreal as one zips bye signs of top technology companies like Google, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, A9, Symantec, Sybase, VM Ware and countless others. The mind is faintly awed and confused at seeing names of the companies whose products I use so often.
Where there are computers, there are Indians. Or so it is these days. Sunnyvale, Fremont and San Jose feature mini Indian towns with countless grocery shops and even a dedicated theater (Naz, run by a Pakistani) for showcasing the best of Bollywood and Tollywood. The Indians here fall into three distinct sections – students, computer professionals and then the underclass of taxi drivers and gas station attendants. Each of these distinct sections of Indian populations feature an ethnic majority – taxi drivers tend to be Sikhs or from Punjab, and computer professionals tend to be from the South (primarily Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh).
The technology industry in Bay Area has a lot to do with both the quality of universities here and the enormous of money that the government spends here to maintain variety of nuclear/arms labs – from Livermore to NASA Ames Research Center. Of course the quality of the university is actively sustained by the money they get in government funding to maintain these labs and in doing research in concert with Department of Defense.
On to the universities - While Berkeley looks a bit dog-eared and is in a slightly impoverished setting reflecting its status as a top-notch gargantuan public university, Stanford itself looks like a tropical resort isolated from a preppy downtown that shows surprisingly little influence of the more than 12,000 students that go to school here. Both universities have a lot in common and among them - abundance of top-notch talent, and an abundance of Asians in the ranks. (Berkeley’s undergraduate population is over 40% Asian since California outlawed Affirmative action). They also have a lot of their departments that feature in the top five in surveys by US News.
No discussion about Bay Area is complete without referencing its astronomical cost of living. Coming from Boston, an expensive market, the rental prices in Palo Alto still gave me sticker shock.
Bay Area is a puzzle. At once intimidating due to its traffic choked highways and the sheer expanse, and welcoming for people tend to smile more than they do on the East Coast. California epitomizes what US is about –a place where everything has been optimized for economic efficiency and where people themselves have become synonymous with the system they work in. People smile the empty smiles of customer service representatives. And a day turns over and people have to go to work again.
