India...hmm…it sure was a blithe, interesting, enlightening and hectic (yeah...yeah...the oxymoronic ‘hectic vacation’) trip. Was I happy to go to India?? Oh yeah!! Was I happy to come back? The answer might hurl me into a pseudo-American clique but I wasn’t exactly morbid to come back.
Due to reasons palpable only to me I couldn't go to India for the last 3 years. Finally last year I took the bold step of, "thinking of", going to India. Told Mom and Dad that I might be coming in Nov/Dec and they were elated (an understatement, to say the least) to hear that. I wanted to go for my friend, Arthi's, marriage but things got so hectic at work that it was almost Christmas when I could take a breather and look at the calendar. And finally come Jan I had to reserve my ticket (my Dad constantly asking me for my itinerary definitely accelerated the process). Only after reserving the ticket and actually seeing the money deduct from my credit card did it actually dawn upon me that I was in fact goin' home.Yippee!!!! Couldn't do a thing in the final week before leaving. The last day I was so beaming with joy that I had earned the wrath of half the colleagues. Anyways...up, up and away....Boston->London->Dubai->Hyd.
The flight to Hyd was uneventful, which is a good thing I guess. Even after reaching Hyderabad I was lucky enough to be one of the first guys to actually come out escaping the greedy tentacles of the customs. And boy oh boy. Did Hyd change!! And what a change it was. The traffic was now at least 10 times what it was before. The roads changed drastically. A little in the quality and a lot more than little in the topography. There were so many buildings now!! Most of the previous landmarks I had known were non-existent. They were replaced by multi-storied malls or restaurants. The city's radius in general must have expanded by at least 15 km (I'm sure this is a perfectly reasonable number and no exaggeration).
I started driving around from the first day. Fortuitous for me there was an auto rickshaw strike and the roads were relatively less crowded. the general notion I got by looking at the number of cars was that most of the average “middle class” crowd are more affluent than before, albeit the poverty level increasing exponentially. Talk about extremes!! Thanks to all the MNC's and the young working crowd the prices have soared sky high and this is more than obvious at the restaurants and the movies. I was particularly aghast when I went to watch a movie at PVR Cinemas in the Hyderabad Central, the supposedly Indian answer to the malls in the US. The ticket was a 100 bucks, an amount I was kind of ready to hear so that wasn't a shocker as were the snacks upstairs. Any beverage you bought was 25 bucks and I had to wait in a snake-like line to get a water bottle. Four of us, a couple of coffees, a tea and water bottle...another 100 bucks...poof just like that. The prices at the Subways and the KFC's were a direct conversion of the prices in the US. I went around treating my belly :) and my wallet :( in different places most of them were new ones, ones which I haven't gone before and I cannot make a comparison of any sort but chutney's is one restaurant I had been to the last time I was there, there 3 yrs ago, an eon of time in terms of price and crowd rise. It was pricey then too and a little crowded (a wait time of 15 mins any time of the day) but it was considered to be a "high class" restaurant for South Indian tiffins and dishes and it was said that you would meet a couple of movie stars if you were there on weekends for breakfast. The idea is not to demean anyone or to suggest that others are not privileged enough to have a decent meal there but the crowd this time, Oh my God!!..It was like a tiffin center next to a busy railway station. 30-45 mins wait time for lunch, majority of the customers were from the MNC's in the neighborhood there for their lunch. Most of them ordering the 'thaali" which was a 125 buck rip off but supposedly "reasonable". I could have spent almost a week with that money when I was doin' my undergrad. Again, the idea is just to project how much the average expenditure per person has changed over the years.
The Pub culture has changed a lot too. There was minimal pub culture earlier but now the city was filled with pubs and most of them damn expensive. I was at a place called Bottles N Chimneys, BNC for the hip crowd, which was in fact pretty hip. The ambience was great I should say. Nice lighting or rather the lack of it, DJ rocking the floor with Hindi remix music, fancy bartender juggling the bottles, hookah pipes and lots of liquor. Everythign comes with a price and price over here was very high. But again, the crowd. Let me put it this way. In a couple of hours you had to mark a square foot as your territory. Your place damn it. You paid a 1000 bucks to get in there and you could kill anyone who dared step into your square :) . I just wanted to mention the emergence of hookah clubs. Supposedly a profitable bussiness today. I just went to a coffee shop, at least that's what I thought it was, with a friend of mine. Walked in, the place was crowded with teens with coffee and hookahs!!! Right there at noon. I mean... I didn't think I would see an adolescent crowd smokin' a hookah with coffee at lunch. The guy comes us and asks if we want a smoking or a non-smoking room. Non-smoking I say and we were the only two people over there for a good hour before a couple of girls showed up and I'm positive it was because the smoking room was full. Just wanted to emphasize how the idea of "hangin out" has changed. Yes sirrrrr...neither a simple coffee shop nor an expensive barrista will do. We need hookah at lunch time to be hip :) .
Another most obvious change as I mentioned earlier was the traffic, the cars. You could find almost all the cars that you see on I-95. The Toyota, Honda, Lexus, Merc and the Czech Skoda (not in the US yet) were all over the place. Invariably 3 out of the 10 cars I saw was a new one (made very obvious with the yellow license plate or the "just out of the showroom" ribbon around the car). The concern about getting a dent was accepted by most of the owners. How the insurance works, is something I am yet to cognize. What else changed?? Hmm...Oh yeah, the real estate. To say that the real estate business is at an all time high would be an understatement. The numbers you hear about the land value are mind-boggling. There's a lot more to write about the real estate boom and I’ll try to fill it in my next blog. The huge campuses of Microsoft, Infosys, Wipro etc are worth mentioning. I didn't have the privilege to visit these campuses but the mammoth portions from outside were enough to catch you in awe.
I could go on and on mentioning the beautiful Charminar, the crafty Shilparamam, the techy Hitech City, the "slightly smelly" Hussain Sagar with its Buddha statue and so on but I think I shall leave this blog to mention the metamorphosis of Hyd and will save the scenic and monumental beauty for an other blog. For now I shall leave you with an abstract yet honest memoir of my trip.
