The handicrafts village

The one regret I had from my trip to Hyderabad this weekend was not going to the handicrafts village early enough. For a variety of reasons we didn't home till noon-ish and that ended up affecting how long we got to spend there.

The place is called Shilparamam and it's right next to the HiTec City complex in Madhapur. (Insert observation about technology co-existing with culture and history, India is a curious mix of extremes etc) From what I saw, I thought the place was just about a bunch of stalls selling clothes, crafts, toys etc and at the end of the day I thought we did a decent job of covering the whole place. Only when I went home and talked to my dad did I realize that we barely saw half of what we could.

But what we saw quite wonderful. The stuff these stalls were selling was fun to browse, and they were even selling them at a discounted rate. Other than the stalls, we even got to watch a faux village. This village was modeled to demonstrate what a tribal village looked like. They had figures enacting daily activities like fetching water, worshiping a cow, making shoes etc. These figures thankfully were just short of falling into the uncanny valley.

At one stage we walked by this really tall figure of a man sitting on a giant chair. Only as we crossed the figure did we realize that this was a real person. My dad later told me the story behind this person. Apparently this guy is really poor and the govt. offered to pay him to stand in this area and let people take pictures with him. It's a very sad story and the guy looked morose standing over there. I didn't realize it when I saw him. And what's sadder is that I don't think he's allowed to take tips.

A bunch of mehendi applying girls were sitting in an area and my mom sat down to get some mehendi done. The mehendi artist was a muslim girl from Hyderabad. Now there is a stereotype of how Hyderabadi Muslim girls speak Telugu, and this girl totally fit that description. It was hilarious to watch someone speak Telugu in way that I'd only seen in movies!

At the end of the day, I was the proud owner of one of those printed cotton shirts with "Om" and other hindu mantras written all over them. Very tacky and very cool at the same time.