Hyderabad is the greatest city in the world

For a long time I tried to change my vote to Austin and it was in fact my default vote since I hadn't lived in Hyderabad (India) for a long time. But now that I'm not in India as a tourist, and am in fact living in Pune, I am seeing Hyderabad as a place where I could see myself living. And it's amazing.

Let me start with the FM radio. The constant Telugu songs - old, recent and brand new. The banter of the RJs who speak decent Telugu for a change. (The early days of cable TV and FM radio were filled with people whose best quality was their upbeat nature rather than a grasp of fluent Telugu. Now we get both skills.) The ads for programs which play sound bytes of actors - or rather some random voice actor imitating the voices of the stars.

Then there's the food. I would love to be able to just walk over (or drive to) to any of the restaurants and try out their food. For the most part they are the same, but Hyderabad, which is now an A1 city, has a rich variety of restaurants.

Then of course there are the movies that I'd love to watch without reading reviews, or about a billion days after they are released. In case I haven't said it before, I'm a proud Telugu, and would rather watch a bad Telugu movie than a good Hindi movie any day. (Of course, I'll make exceptions for exceptional Hindi movies like Lagaan or Munnabhai MBBS.)

Lastly, there's the tourist spots. Birla Mandir, Tank Bund, Charminar, shopping in Koti/Abids and the numerous malls and multiplexes.

If ony I was born 20 years late, and went to college in Hyderabad and then went on work there. Aah ...

I'm on the Highway to Hell

Aaargh!!! I dunno what's more frustrating, being four hours late for work because the bus from Hyderabad was four hours late, or coming to work and realizing that they still haven't got anything substantial for you to do.

The journey back from Hyderabad (which I keep typing as Hyderabad - hmm, maybe I should copyright that) was on an APSRTC bus (Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation). The price was almost the same and except for the bottle of water (that was present on my way to Hyd and missing on the APSRTC bus) the experience was similar - a Telugu movie, blanket and cold a/c.

The differences were subtle at first. We left the city much later than promised. The bus also made much longer stops for bathroom breaks. During the first of these stops, the a/c in the bus was shut off, leaving the passengers suffocating after 10 minutes (the windows were sealed and there was zero air circulation) - luckily the driver came to his senses and turned the a/c back on at full blast.

And then we had the first tire blow out at 1am. I don't remember much about this since I fell asleep immediately after the blowout. And then at 5am we had another blowout. I tried to go back to sleep after this but couldn't. For a few hours I watched from my window as they tried to fix the tire. I couldn't see what the problem was but I could hear a lot of banging and hammering and about 10 passengers crowded around the driver who was trying to work on the tire. Normally changing a tire shouldn't take that long. Finally at 6:30am I got curious and got down from the bus.

Turned out the tire in blowing up had ripped apart the steel mud guard surrounding it. This meant that the steel segments would eventually tear apart the spare tire as well. So the driver, with help from the cleaner and some other passengers, was trying to tear out the damaged mud guard. This he was doing with crude tools like a hammer and the rod for the jack.

Meanwhile a bunch of passengers took their bags and decided to hitchhike. I assumed we were pretty close to Pune since it was already 7am. I found out that were still 236 kms from Pune, and just six kms out of Solapur. Basically were only halfway through our journey from Hyderabad!! I knew I wouldn't be able to make it to the 9:30am joint meeting at work. I made a few calls and got the word out to my family and work that I was in the middle of nowhere (I'm glad there were cellphone coverage there!)

Turned out the guys weren't hitchhiking all the way to Pune, they were just trying to get the next village to pick up some cigarettes! They came back in time and we finally managed to get going at 7:30 am and after reaching Pune, going home and showering etc, I didn't get to work till 2pm!

As with all mishaps in my life, I looked at the silver lining. Normally I'd eat a very light meal before a bus journey because of the lack of clean toilet facilities on the way. This time on a impulse I made an exception and had a decent meal. This of course helped me from getting too hungry and either eating with an unclean mouth or having to use some really dirty water to brush my teeth. And thankfully I didn't need to use the toilet till I reached home. My guardian angel is still watching over me!

Deus ex Mahesh Babu

I took my parents out to watch a movie. It was their first movie in a theatre since Yamadonga, so more than an year ago. We went to watch "Ashta Chemma" (name of a Ludo-like game native to Andhra Pradesh). It was a safe bet to be family-safe, so no awkward moments as I watch it with my family. The movie is about a girl who is obsessed with Mahesh Babu (the actor) and when he gets married, decides to settle for any cute boy as long as his name is Mahesh. It's supposed to be based on "The Importance of Being Earnest". The movie had a very weak script and relied largely on the acting talents of the actors to carry the plot. Honestly I think the director just walked into the producer's office and said, "In this movie, Swati will pout and look cute." "OK, make the movie". The ending was astonishingly contrived (for a movie that seemed to be doing well till then). Let's just say Deus ex Mahesh Babu.

What I found interesting was the movie theatre. The best seats in the place cost us only Rs. 35. So for the three of us to watch the movie, and for me to get my cold drink (Thums Up) and the parking charge for the car cost us less than it cost me the previous weekend to watch a Telugu movie in a multiplex in Pune. I asked my dad why there was so much discrepancy and how the smaller theatre managed to make any profit while selling tickets for a fraction of the price the multiplexes were charting. Apparently it's to do with the overhead costs for the multiplex that the smaller theatres don't have. And the fact that they make up in volume what they don't make up in price. The theatre of course came with its own flavor - the smell of urine, sweat and sticky floors - that was missing from the multiplex.

A fun day out with my mom

On Friday, seeing as dad was going to be at work, mom wanted me to come shopping with her. Normally I would wince at the thought of going shopping for things like curtains and bedsheets but this was a handicrafts exhibition and I was really curious. It turned out to be a lot of fun. So much fun that our plan to get out of the place in an hour went out of the window and we ended up spending a great deal of time and money at the place.

The exhibition was mainly meant to showcase the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) project, which was incidentally started by N. Chandrababu Naidu (suck on that YSR!). I was given to understand by the stall managers they got the stalls and space for free and so they in turn were selling their merchandise for significant discounts.

The merchandise was significantly diverse. They were selling made from cloth (bedsheets, towels, lungis, kerchiefs, clothes for men and women and children), wood (furniture, toys, puppets), fibre (supension chairs, more toys) and an assortments of other material like animal horns, leather and clay. The DWCRA project was started in a bunch of places but it was successful only in AP. As a result, while there were stalls from all over India - Goa, Kerala, Rajasthan etc. - the stalls from AP were a lot more in number and hence, represented a lot of parts of AP that even I didn't now. It was nice to see a lot of Telugu being spoken and I loved the sales banter that went on in the stores.

In one store, the saleslady started adding food items to our bag without asking and when we tried to stop her we got a dose of one of the most efficient sales pitch I'd ever heard - just a simple, "Oh come on, these are good, just try them." One guy sold his incense sticks by telling us, "If you don't like the smell of the sticks, bring them back and I'll refund your Rs. 20 and pay you Rs. 50 for the auto charges." Another guy sold us honey by insisting that the higher price was worth it since they made honey only 2 month of the year. (This guy has honey from the flowers of Aloe Vera!!)

Poor mom, she walked around even with her hurt knee. And what's more, we brought dad to the same place the next day and made him walk around for about an hour.

My friend opines on stuff

Thursday was all about me. I spent time with a few of my oldest friends, people I've known since 1993. It was a great reunion. Of the five of us (who formed a group) three are married(JBR, Arun and Chandu), one of those has a kid (Arun), another was getting engaged on Thursday (that was Satish's enagement where the reunion happened) and I, being the youngest, am currently the only single one. Rarely do the five of us get to meet, probably happened just once, but four of us is rare too. We reminisced about common friends, teachers, updated each other on our work etc.

After the engagement I got together with my friend JBR and went to his apt. JBR is an ultra-Right wing conservative. He makes my American conservative friends seem like radicals by comparison. (Only Arun is arguably more conservative) When JBR and I start talking, time just flies. He had to push me out of his apt in the end, and even that was because he is now a married man. Or else God knows we'd still be talking about stuff.

A few things I learned -

• Maybe it's just him but his primary complaint to me about Obama was "How in the world are you guys electing a Muslim candidate?" I had to explain to him that Obama was in fact Christian, his Muslim-sounding middle name not withstanding. And then explain to him that the bigger deal in this election was that a Black man was going to get elected President of the US, which is a big deal since the US had segregation as recently as a few decades ago.
  
• On a related note, there is a good chance the country might have its first lower caste Prime Minister - Mayawati - after this election.
  
• There is no true Right-Left division in India. The BJP is Right on social issues, but Congress is more Right on Economic issues. However Congress on social issues blows whichever way the wind blows. The Left in India - the communist parties - ironically have a lot of deals with some Right wing parties like TDP. In West Bengal, it's the Trinamool Congress that opposing the deal to give land (purchased from the farmers) to Tata for the Nano plant. The CM, who is from a Communist party supports the land deal. 
• Whenever Pakistan supports the "oppressed" Muslims in Kashmir, it's not the people they care for. It's the land. So here's his deal - we will provide safe passage to all the Muslims in Kashmir (who feel oppressed) to Pakistan, in turn, shut the hell up and stop killing Indians in India. Sounds like a fair deal to me. 
• (This point my dad brought up independently.) The formation of a separate Telangana state from AP is not a bad thing - as long as Hyderbad is not part of the new state. The Telangana movement is nothing but a political move by politicians who fancy themselves leaders and want to steal the crown jewel of the state for themselves. So let Hyderabad be a centrally-governed province and let's split up the rest. Of course, the Telangana folk will cry bloody murder at this because other than Hyderabad, the rest of Telangana is just barren land.

A different kind of colonization

Whenever I watch Gandhi, or for that matter when I read about pre-Independence India, I was always surprised by the fact that there were a lot of Indian soldiers and policemen who were employed by the British. "How can Indians not just stand by while people of a different nation were subjugating their countrymen, and not just stand by but actually help beat up the Indians, or fire at them etc?" I wondered.

 

When I landed in Pune three weeks ago, my boss and another co-worker (both White Americans) came to pick me up. It was day of the immersion of Ganesh statues that day and the roads were pretty clogged up. They managed to get to the airport well, but apparently got stuck earlier in the day. Even as they were driving me to my guesthouse, we almost got trapped in a small street, but luckily our destination was behind us and we managed to get to the guesthouse.

 

As they were giving me direction to get to work the next day, the co-worker said, "It shouldn't be too hard I imagine, we should be done with this Ganesh crap by then."

 

That stung me. And a part of me wanted to lecture him on respecting the local customs, and at the very least, not to express such sentiments out loud. But I chickened out since my boss was right there and I didn't want to create an issue even before my first day at work. So I let it pass. And I felt like crap for doing that. No matter how much of an inconvenience it is, Ganesh Chathurti is a big festival in India. It was popularized during the Independence struggle and played a big role in creating a feeling of community in the country. Not to mention the religious sanctity of the festival. And I let an outsider pass a negative comment on the festival without reprimanding him because I wanted to keep my job.

 

Of course, this brought on a big internal discussion about foreign investments and the way we are ignoring the cultural erosion that's a consequence of this. At what cost are we creating jobs and improving the economy? After seeing myself stay silent, it's not hard to imagine Indian soldiers and policemen wearing British uniforms and beating up their countrymen. The bottomline is money and everyone has a selling point.

 

Happy Birthday Gandhiji

It's Oct 2nd, a national holiday. I took advantage of the fact that it's on a Thursday and took Friday off to get a four-day weekend. I'm writing from Hyderabad. An annual tradition in India is to watch the movie "Gandhi". Today I'm watching it in Telugu.

 

I took a bus to come here since the train gets booked pretty fast. Even the bus cost me a decent amount since it is sort of peak season. What was worse that the bus was late. Which in itself is not a big deal here but being as I am new, I was panicking pretty fast. At first I thought the travel agency runs a scam. Then I thought it was a mini scamby one of the employees of the agency. Eventually the bus did show up and I managed to get on it. The bus was comfortable too. The seats recline almost all the way back. They gave out blankets and water bottles. I managed to pass out pretty quickly and didn't wake up till we entered the city limits of Hyderabad.

 

Today's a big day. One of my friends is getting engaged today. I haven't seen him in over five years. And one of my best friends who got married last year invited me to his place. It's a big occasion, meeting the spouse and eating at his place.