Buying A Sim Card In Bangalore

Thomas Friedman never had to buy a SIM card in Bangalore

By Michael Hardy in Bangalore

My Lonely Planet guidebook told me that Bangalore is the Silicon Valley of India, a 21 century IT hub that inspired Thomas Friedman to declare the world to be flat. Friedman became a flat-earther after visiting the Bangalore campus of Infosys, the wildly-successful Indian software giant. Infosys’s carefully-manicured campus, with its own stores, restaurants, and gyms, reminded Friedman of American corporate headquarters, and he decided that if you could make it in India you could make it anywhere. But one and a half frenetic days in this mega-city have taught me one indisputable lesson: Thomas Friedman never had to buy a SIM card in Bangalore.

Because I am not a wealthy and famous writer like Friedman (who was probably given a phone by Infosys), I did have to buy a SIM card. In “India’s Silicon Valley” this took — I swear I am not making this up — the entire day. My fiancée Nimanthi and I set off in the morning by taking an auto-rickshaw to the Mahatma Gandhi (MG) Road shopping district, which the Lonely Planet folks assured me was a great favourite of tourists. They clearly meant tourists who already possessed SIM cards, since a Vodafone or Airtel store was nowhere in sight. Having visited the city before, Nimanthi suggested that we walk towards St. Mark’s Cathedral, so we crossed under a highway overpass and walked along the edge of Cubbon Park, looking for a store.

After half an hour we hadn’t seen anything, and we were beginning to realise that we needed local assistance, so we flagged an auto-rickshaw and asked to be taken to the nearest mobile phone store. And thank God we did — the nearest store turned out to be a 15-minute ride across town to a Vodafone outlet. Marveling at the traffic and the absence of pedestrians, I was reminded of Houston, Texas, another city designed with cars rather than people in mind.

At the sleek, air-conditioned Vodafone store Nimanthi and I were told by a polite salesman that to buy a SIM card we would have to present two passport photos and proof of local residency. Well, we weren’t local residents, so we didn’t have proof of local residency. As for photos, who carries pictures of themselves around in their wallet? Because the salesman assured us that there were no photo studios in the area, we reluctantly decided to go back to the MG Road area.

Here our luck seemed to improve. We found a studio and purchased passport photographs — they even made me look good. Then we stumbled upon a hole-in-the-wall copy shop that sold Vodafone SIM cards. Reasoning that this joint might have looser standards than the official Vodafone store, we descended a narrow flight of stairs, squeezing past customers queued up to send faxes or make copies. The beleaguered store manager handed us an application to fill out while he began the process of activating our new SIM.

This process consisted of the manager having cryptic phone conversations with various people, followed by him punching long codes into his own mobile phone. At the end of this lengthy ritual, however, our phone still read “SIM locked.” Checkmate. The manager asked for two minutes to get it activated, but having already waited half an hour, Nimanthi and I decided to cut our losses and go somewhere else, taking our completed application with us.

That somewhere else turned out to be another Vodafone outlet. The salesman at this store didn’t care that we were foreigners, and since we had already filled out an application we were handed a SIM card within minutes. We slid the card into the back of our phone, replaced the battery, and hit the power button. “SIM locked,” the screen read. The salesman told us that the problem wasn’t the card but the phone, which was programmed to only work in Sri Lanka. We could either unlock the phone or buy a new one. Being short of cash, we decided to unlock it. If only it were that easy! We spent the next hour wandering the busy streets of Bangalore searching for somebody to unlock our phone. At every store the manager told us that he couldn’t unlock it, but that his buddy down the street certainly could.

The buddy down the street couldn’t unlock it either, it would inevitably turn out, but his buddy around the corner definitely could do the job. Finally we found somebody who promised to unlock it: just give him two minutes. Fifteen minutes later: “SIM locked.” Just to see if our SIM was activated yet, we tried it out in the manager’s phone. You can guess the result.

Now in possession of an unactivated SIM card and a locked phone, we doubled back to the original Vodafone store. There, our salesman assured us he could activate our card — just give him two minutes to make a few calls. As that two minutes stretched into ten (the salesman’s boss was in a meeting, he helpfully informed us), we asked to look at the store’s mobile phones. The salesman called another employee over and gave him instructions. “He will go get the key,” the salesman told us. “Just wait two minutes.” By now we had learned that two minutes in Bangalore time could mean anything between “half an hour” and “next month,” so we told the salesman that maybe we would get a phone somewhere else.

Long story short: the salesman managed to activate the SIM card, but we still haven’t bought a phone, so while we have 100 rupees of air time we have no way to use it. After our experience in Bangalore, we’re beginning to wonder if it’s worth it. So, Tom Friedman: The world may be flat, but that just makes it easier to fall off the edge.