The Hyderabad Diaries, 2008
Oh God, bestow unto this city peace and prosperity. Let millions of men of all castes, creeds and religions make it their abode, like fishes in the water.
-- Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah
May 25: Animated Airplanes Over Germany
High above the north Atlantic, in an aircraft so immense that it must surely be unsuited to flight, the sun is setting. There is a vast coral line meeting the dark of the ocean, and I choose to believe we are high enough above the world to observe the curvature of the earth.
But you can only look at something like that for so long before it loses it's sense of majesty, and pales in comparison with the entertainment options available in one's seating area. My seatmate, for instance, a silent German business traveler, evinces little interest in anything outside the cabin windows. He faces the prospect of a nine-hour trans-Atlantic flight with Teutonic stoicism, and I am conflicted by my desire to emulate him. Later he will fall into a deep and unshakeable sleep for nearly the entire length of the journey.
I am in an enormous aircraft surrounded by Germans for reasons of business travel, en route to the mysterious city of Hyderabad, in southern India. (Hyderabad is a teeming city of millions of souls, as some small amount of research has shown, so it is mysterious only to myself, an American with little knowledge of the subcontinent). The Germans run an impressive airline. It's a little like being on a tiny, airborne vacation, what with the nice food and ever-present service.
It is possible that this has more to do with sitting in business class than it does with Germany. I am unused to sitting in the forward section of commercial aircraft, and I have been behaving with the tentative uncertainty endemic to those of the middle class when confronted with situations for which their social upbringing has not prepared them. I was not sure how the little table folded out of the arm-rest, I was puzzled by most of the elaborate controls in my chair (back massage!), and I was somewhat behind the curve during the multi-course dinner (Why does everyone else have a silverware for the main course? Was I not supposed to surrender mine after the salad and appetizer plate? Is there special entree cutlery in a secret compartment somewhere? Was everyone else issued an extra knife and fork upon graduating from Andover?).
But, like the magnificence of the airborne sunset, such thoughts are fleeting and ephemeral, and I discard them as the overhead lights blink off. My employer, after all, has paid a handsome sum for the privilege of seating me in this high-tech, ergnomically-advanced chair, so I try to assume the mantle of the ruling class for the duration of the flight.
(Seriously.. so much money. I am embarrassed by the amount. I have never owned a car for which I paid as much money as this ticket to India. I am keenly aware that whatever self-satisfaction I might have earned over my relatively spare ecological footprint - derived from not owning a car and using a bicycle as my primary form of transportation - has been squandered on my share of the jet-fuel for this single trip.)
My nine-hour flight will end in Frankfurt, Germany, where I will spend a bleary-eyed morning awaiting the arrival of my second, and equally long, flight to India. It will be early morning in Frankfurt, and the air will ring with cheerful guten morgens as the Germans prepare, efficiently, for their day; but it will be the middle of the night for my American brain, and I will be in no mood for good humor.
I feel like I'm already taking steps toward acclimating myself for the jet lag, however, since I have no earthly idea what time it is. All my electronic devices (cell phone, computer, PDA) are showing a different time from one another. I guess some of them know they are in a rapidly-moving metal tube traversing time zones at subsonic speeds, and some of them do not. Why do I have so many devices anyway? They are worse than useless.
Regardless, I must try to sleep, since, whatever time it is anywhere else in the world, it is night-time in the tiny country of this airplane.
May 28: The City With No Addresses
It is early in the morning, here in Hyderabad, and I am, sadly, awake. I am awake because I have completely lost the ability to sleep for more than five hours. I guess this is the terrible jet lag everyone talks about. I adjusted immediately to local time, but for the last two days I've woken up early, unable to sleep. I did get to take a nap yesterday afternoon, before the cricket match, so I should not complain.
I agreed to go see a cricket match weeks ago. My traveling companion, Rash (a Londoner born in India), is a cricket fan, and Ashok, one of the managers from the office where we are working, took us to a match last night (or, possibly, a game).
The home team, the Deccan Chargers, were playing the Chennai Super Kings. Apparently the Deccan Chargers are not very good. "It will be a good place for you to catch up on your sleep!" said one of the men at the office, whose name I did not catch.
It was explained to me that, since there is some sort of tournament underway, Deccan could prevent the Mumbai team (who are the New York Yankees of cricket, as near as I can tell - overpaid, vilified and oft-victorious) from advancing further by beating Chennai, although no one was expecting this to happen.
I did not enjoy the cricket game all that much, but I don't blame the sport itself for that. I've also been to basketball and baseball games that I didn't enjoy all that much.
But, much like going to a baseball game, it's nice to get out with all the people. We ended up sitting in a section reserved for Chennai fans. Rash and Ashok were the only ones cheering for Deccan, but nothing happened to us aside from some dirty looks. I was tempted to try and get one of the matching shirts they were all wearing, since they were bright yellow, and bore the slogan "Fearless entertainers who play to win!", but I did not see them for sale anywhere.
The nurse who gave my my travel immunizations warned me about going out at night, since that's when the malaria-bearing mosquitoes come out and inflict terrible diseases on you, but I say to hell with it. I did not see any mosquitoes at the cricket grounds at Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium, although there were vast clouds of midges by all the lights.
In fact, before I came to India, various friends and health professionals and websites had me convinced that there was no way I would make it out alive, and that I needed to refrain from eating, drinking or touching anything. I'm not really worried about it anymore, though. I'm staying in a fancy Western-style hotel, and working at a tech-company office that would be perfectly at home in northern Virginia, so my contact with the brutal urban environment of metropolitan India is limited.
Speaking of work, I had better finish my watermelon juice, find a relentlessly polite and violently reckless cab driver, and get going. I went to the office yesterday, but I was sort of fatigued and out of things, so I didn't get much done, unless you count amusing Ashok and Vijai with my reaction to lunch as being productive. (It was excellent food, but I went through an entire bottle of water and juicebox of apple juice trying to combat the intense heat). Still, it was neither simple nor inexpensive to come to Hyderabad, so I had better get a few things done while I am here.
May 29: The Ancient Shopping Malls of India
Being all the way around the world is weird. My internal clock is still off, so I get really sleepy around 6:30 or 7 pm every night, and I wake up at the crack of dawn, no matter how little sleep I may have managed to get. Plus all the people back home are going to sleep when I'm getting up, and vice versa. It's a little difficult to work, since I need to talk to people back in "the states" (as our British friends would have it), but no sooner do I get to the office than everyone goes home and goes to bed, so I stop getting emails right after breakfast, and then they start coming in again when I'm getting ready to go to sleep. The many challenges of outsourcing.
Last night I was absolutely beat, but Rash insisted I go out with him and his friend Srini. Which turned out well, since Srini is very jolly, and took us all over Hyderabad. We went to the mall, and then to a fancy Thai restaurant overlooking a big lake in the middle of the city. The lake was beautiful -- all ringed with lights from bridges and streetlamps, and there was a gigantic illuminated statue of the Buddha at one end. We were counseled not to go near the lake, however, since, apparently, most of the solid waste of that part of the city empties into it, and it smells awful.
The mall was funny to see. It was pretty similar to a mall back home; there was a food court, a movie theater, a video game store, and teeming throngs of unruly teenagers. There were a lot more people though. I think you can say that about any place you might be in urban India. There are a lot more people on the bus, on the staircase, on the roads, in the bathroom. Everywhere there are people. The office where we are working is part of this neighborhood of technology companies, and there's a wall with a gate in front of each one, but there is a five-foot strip of well-tended grass between the walls and the road (which is quite rare, as near as I can tell, since most of the roads simply blend into the dirt), and I'm pretty sure there are people LIVING on that grass strip. They were washing sheets this afternoon.
The roads here are the craziest things you ever saw. There is no kind of law or order or sense to any of it, just a huge mass of tiny cars and motorbikes and giant crazy trucks and auto-rickshaws and bicycles and wild packs of feral dogs, all surging in multiple directions.
The concept of "lanes" is not a fixed one either. If there is a slower-moving vehicle in your lane -- and there is ALWAYS a slower-moving vehicle in your lane, including tractors, bicycles and people on foot -- then you just swerve into the opposite lane and keep going, even though it is a certainty that there will be five other cars and seven motor scooters coming directly toward you. The specter of immediate death is constant on the roadways of Hyderabad, but no one seems to notice.
Today some of the manager-types took us out to lunch, and I rode with one of them, Madhu, who had spent many years in America (all of the head programmers have lived in America at some point), which is where he first learned to drive. "There are many rules for driving in America," he said. "But here that would not work. Stop signs? No, that would not work at all. Everything would stop."
May 30: Friday Night in High Tech City
The part of Hyderabad where I've been working is called HITEC* City. It's all brand-new, built within the last five years. The part of the city with the hotel I'm staying in is even newer. The hotel, which is extremely fancy and modern, sits on a hill surrounded by construction sites, empty fields, and huge chunks of asphalt. It is not an inspiring view.
* Hyderabad Information Technology Engineering Consultancy
The entire city of Hyderabad appears to be under construction, especially out here on the edges. If you've never seen an entire city springing into being from the ground up, it's quite a sight. It's impressive conceptually, if not visually.
Speaking of the hotel, that's where I'm spending my Friday night. Not exciting, but a) I don't exactly know a lot of people here, and b) I can use the rest. Tomorrow is tourist day, with an early morning trip to the Charminar and an evening trip to the Golconda planned. Historically- and culturally-significant architecture, here I come.
Since I didn't do anything worth sharing today, unless you like hearing about a conference room full of computer programmers arguing about version history, I will leave you with some thoughtful words from my mother.
People in The US just don't understand how most of the world lives.
What an experience to appreciate all we have
love Mom
Ps Wear sunscreen
May 31: Trouble at the Charminar
Having spent the week mostly shuttling back and forth between the hotel and the office, I was anxious to get out on Saturday and see the real deal. It turns out that the old city in Hyderabad is neither picturesque nor charming. There is a reason why you do not see any western tourists around here.
The men from the office we're working at sent us a car and driver, which was nice of them, and he took us to the Charminar, which was a lengthy journey. Hyderabad is a vast place; in geographic terms it is the second-largest city in India, and, since we are staying out in what passes for the suburbs, getting anywhere is a serious trek.
The Charminar itself is an ancient mosque, with four minarets, set in a circle in the center of the city. It's sort of the iconic image of Hyderabad. It's impressive, but it's kind of old and weathered. To get to it, we parked on a little hillside nearby and attempted to cross the traffic circle. Like all roadways in Hyderabad, it was filled to the edges with cars, trucks, mopeds, auto-rickshaws, pedestrians, and even some sacred cows, which looked pretty weathered themselves.
Unfortunately, distracted by my surroundings, I did not pay the required degree of attention to the traffic, and I was sideswiped by a motor-scooter and thrown violently to the ground.
It sounds worse than it was. It hit me from the side, and I went straight into the road. The driver, a gangly young man in brown pants, and his passenger, a woman in a black head-to-toe chador, fared worse. She went right into the road with me. I scraped my elbows up a little, but I wasn't hurt, and the two people from the scooter seemed okay as well. They didn't speak English, though, so my attempts to apologize were met with vacant looks.
Most of the other traffic in the circle just went right around us, but a few other scooters got a little tangled up, and a cop came running over. I thought he was going to help straighten things out, but instead he lit right into the driver, and started berating him loudly and angrily. You are not supposed to drive your motorbike straight into the only white person for miles, apparently.
The cop was getting meaner and meaner about it, and I was starting to worry that he was going to beat the poor guy with a stick, or haul him off to prison or something, so I interposed myself and tried to explain that it was okay, the whole thing was my fault. None of them spoke English, and none of them acknowledged me. They just treated me like an obstacle, and talked around me.
Eventually the cop got tired of yelling, and the people got back on their scooter and drove away, and we went up into the Charminar to enjoy the exotic but depressing view of central Hyderabad.
We also paid the tourist rate for getting into the mosque; the posted cost of entry was 5 rupees, but the ticket-taker pointed to a little sign that read "Visitors from other countires, 100 Rs". Yes, this represents a 2,000% markup, but then again, 100 rupees is only $2.50, so no harm done. We took some pictures from the top of the mosque, and all the little kids stared at me like I was a space alien, and then we left to get harassed by beggars.
The beggars in inner-city India are a serious bunch. They are not pan-handlers, comically ragged 1930's-style hobos. They are beggars, right out of the middle ages. They were mostly women with small children, and they came at us in droves, clinging to our clothes and pleading with us. It was not easy to ignore them, but there would have been an army upon us as soon as we started handing out rupees. Rescued by our driver, who appeared from nowhere, we escaped in the anonymous safety of our borrowed car.
Since the attempt to see the older part of the city had not gone well, we asked him to take us to a shopping area. He took us to a mall in an upscale part of town, which was depressing in a different way, since it was exactly like a mall back home. On the plus side, no one paid much attention to me, and there were no pitiful mothers begging for change, but I also did not travel all the way around the world to see McDonald's and a Reebok store, so we went back to the hotel.
So, all in all, not the most successful morning, but sometimes that's how it goes. Tonight one of the men from the office is taking us to the Golconda, an old fort in the center of the city. I think there is some sort of light show, but I might be making that up.
June 3: Clean Ears in South-Central India
Today is my last full day in Hyderabad. It has been a lovely experience, but I will be happy to be home, not least because I am sick of Indian food.
We had lunch yesterday with some of the project managers again, and they were all entertained, and slightly horrified, to hear the story of my independent outing on Sunday. The part that horrified them was when the guy on the street cleaned my ears for 100 rupees. "I do not think that is very safe," said Madhu.
After Saturday's morning trip to the Charminar and evening visit to Golconda*, I had intended to spent Sunday doing nothing important, but I was starting to get cabin fever at the hotel, so I decided I would go out and explore Hyderabad on my own for a change.
* Golconda was magnificent; an ancient city-fortress in the center of town. I wish we'd spent more time there, although the "sound and light show" was something of a let-down, since it mostly consisted of a recorded voice explaining the history of the fort in exhaustive, mind-numbing detail, along with a bunch of songs in Arabic and Telagu, and a colored spotlights randomly picking out various spots on the side of the hill.
One of the reasons that the hotel was driving me insane was the sheer overwhelming presence of the staff. The combination of this hotel's fanciness, it's brand-newness (hence our ability to afford it), and India's general policy of overstaffing means that in the hundred or so yards between the front door and the door to my room, you encounter five different men whose sole purpose in being there is to open the door for you. Breakfast was even worse. I could not get through a paragraph in my book without a waiter appearing to pour me some water, or offer me mutton or vegetable biriyani or Lord knows what, or turn the pages for me. It is maddening.
So I got a car and had him take me to the only large public place I could remember how to get to, Hussain Sagar Lake, which is next to a big outdoor family amusement park, as well as Prasads, which is mostly a mall, but also includes a movie theater, and IMAX, a video arcade, and a haunted house. The whole area is definitely the place to be for Hyderabadis looking for some laughs, which was a company in whose number I counted myself, for the moment.
I spent a couple hours walking around, smiling at people, eating a weird veggie-burger, and gently refusing other goods and services suggested to me by elderly bearded men on the sidewalk. At one point, however, I was sitting on a low wall when a man sat down next to me and started cleaning the inside of my ear.
I was alarmed by this development, as anyone would be, and I tried to express my lack of interest as vigorously as possible, but he was very persistent, and he had an assistant, and a little laminated card explaining what a good ear-cleaner he was, and one thing led to another, so I just let him clean my ears. They did need a cleaning, it must be admitted.
He didn't actually do that great a job though. Plus he charged me 1,000 rupees, which is what you might expect to pay for a nice lunch for half a dozen people, and was clearly not the going rate for getting your ears cleaned on the side of the road. I gave him 100 rupees instead (which was still wildly generous), and got out of there.
Still, a successful outing, all things considered. Yesterday it was back to work, and as soon as I finish this, I am headed back to the office to spend one more day trying to make the world a better place, or at least a place with greater ease of communication between American news editors and Indian software developers.
June 4: Goodbye and Namaskar
I am back at Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, waiting for my flight to Amsterdam. It's really a very nice airport, as modern as you could want.
Plus security is more lax than in the states. For instance, no one is allowed into the airport without a ticket, as I was informed by the soldier/police guys out front. I didn't have a ticket, but I did have my flight number written in pen on a torn-out sheet of notebook paper, which was judged to be adequate. "No one could forge a document like this," they were probably saying to each other in Telagu.
Security is one major difference between America and India. In America, there is a vast, ritualized security apparatus in the style of Kabuki theater. It doesn't actually do much aside from massively inconveniencing everyone and keeping us in a state of constant paranoia regarding Arabs, but the artistic forms are quite rigid, and one cannot deviate from them in any way. In India, on the contrary, there are security guards everywhere, piles of them outside every office and restaurant and park, but they are mostly there as ornamentation, like potted trees or decorative statuary. If you make eye contact with them, they will demand all sorts of documents and force you to fill out forms in triplicate, but if you ignore them and push your way past, they give up and try to hassle the next guy.
Another way in which Rajiv Gandhi International Airport differs from, say Dulles International, is the lack of places to spend money whilst you wait around for your airplane. There are a couple little cafes, but I absolutely cannot eat another mouthful of Indian food.
Other things of which I have had my fill include unearthly heat, Punjabi hip-hop music, beverages served at room temperature, goats impeding traffic, and overly helpful members of the service industry. I enjoy all these things, mind you, it's just that I'm tired, and ready to return to the dying remnants of Western civilization.
[One month later...]
July 6: Bleary-Eyed in Frankfurt
I did not manage to sleep on the trans-Atlantic flight. I read most of a book of Roger Zelazny short stories, then watched half of "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead", in which Ethan Hawke and Phillip Seymour Hoffman rob their parents, turned it off because it was depressing me, and then watched all of "21", in which a bunch of smart college kids beat the system in Vegas and turn the tables on Kevin Spacey, their evil professor, which was easier to watch because it was trite and formulaic. Why this should be so, I cannot say.
At any rate, I didn't get to sleep, and I didn't really try very hard. I know people have all kinds of secret plans to trick the body's internal clock, but I mostly don't buy that. I favor the method of staying up as long as you would stay up anyway, and then forcing yourself to stay up until you completely zonk out. This may or may not be any more effective, but it worked okay for me the last time they sent me to India.
Essentially, traveling around the world far enough that your internal clock is almost exactly turned on its head is going to mess with your system no matter what you do. Tens of thousands of years of inexorable evolutionary history made manifest by predators and tidal cycles and the North American sun will not be so easily cast aside in a matter of days, no matter what some Harvard-mouthed yachstman may have read in last month's 'Well-Heeled Business Traveler'.
Since I last left off this journal, I have spent an inordinate amount of time in airports. I was in DC for about a week, then back in Cleveland for a couple weeks, then in the tiny Caribbean island of St. Kitts for five days, then back in DC for another four days, followed by twenty-four hours in Minneapolis, back to Cleveland for all of last week, and now back to mysterious, inscrutable, overheated Hyderabad.
Most of this was work-related, aside from the wedding/barbecue in Minneapolis. My friends and family were impressed by my new-ish job for a time, since people tend to assume that jobs involving a lot of travel must be fancy and important, but now everyone just expresses pity for me. So many airports, each more airport-y than the last.
At the moment I am in Germany, surrounded by Teutonic efficiency and modernist furniture. I have, at any rate, become a more sophisticated international business traveler. Rather than wander the Frankfurt airport in a bleary-eyed stupor, I made straight for the Lufthansa business lounge, where nice chairs and free juice can be found. There is also booze here, but as an American abroad, I feel it is incumbent upon me to retain some of the dignity of our beleaguered and maligned people.
July 8: Beautiful Andhra Pradesh
It is morning in Hyderabad, and I am awake to see it because I went to sleep at 9:30 pm, exhausted beyond all measure, and woke up shortly after dawn. I actually heard a rooster crow, somewhere outside.
Hyderabad, in case you are wondering, is much the same as when I left it a month ago. There are still two hundred people in every cubic foot of space, the traffic is still a terrible ballet of fear and reckless danger, and the trucks are still covered in bling.
It is, however, the monsoon season. The rains have gone, but the sky is overcast, and there is a lovely breeze. Who would have thought that summer in India would be so pleasant? I should look into renting a shack in August. Maybe something by the airport.
At the moment, I am sitting on the tiny deck/porch off my hotel room, overlooking a scenic vista of endless scrubby trees on endless little hills. Soon enough there will be the sounds of endless construction workers building an endless succession of western-style office towers for various software companies to inhabit. For the moment, however, all seems well, here in the ancient heart of Andhra Pradesh.
I have, alas, nothing of interest to report. I have spent most of my recent time in India in an office, and the rest sleeping the fitful sleep of the jet-lagged. I can attest that I am still a little sick of Indian food, but what can you do? That's what they've got in these parts.
July 10: Failing to Taste the Thunder
When I was last in India, I went to a cricket match, ate dinner at local restaurants, visited historic forts and the teeming center city, argued with beggars, rode in auto-rickshaws, went to the mall, had my ears cleaned by a street vendor, and generally breathed deep the saffron-scented air of the ancient subcontinent.
This time I wake up early, read the International Tribune, work all day, and am fast asleep by 9 pm. I've become a jaded international business traveler overnight. I should be featured in a commercial for some sort of high-priced ergonomic keyboard.
I considered traveling a little while I was here, since I don't get to Asia all that often. Flights to Nepal were only $400 or so. But I'm too beat. Traveling for work, especially overseas, seems glamorous at first, but it is distinctly not. I'm not sure whether I'm generally fatigued from my grueling travel schedule this summer, or whether I'm just another provincial American demanding to know why no one speaks English and there are no hamburgers available.
Speaking of fast food, I ate lunch at Subway yesterday, my first non-Indian meal in Hyderabad. My decision was driven more by the limited time I had available to eat, rather than by some homesick longing for American cultural institutions. I can report that Subway in India is every bit as crappy as Subway in the states, except they have chicken tikka.
I was slightly excited about going to Subway because they offered 'Thums Up!' ("Taste the thunder!") as a drink choice, and I have not managed to have any yet. It's some kind of primitive soft drink that was popular in India before the inexorable coming of Coca-Cola. It was described to me as being "like Coke, but much stronger".* I'm not sure what that means. I asked if it was sweeter, and was told "No.. it's just much stronger", an answer that is baffling in its opacity. Sadly, this particular Subway was all out, and I had to drink Fanta.
* From Wikipedia: Other campaigns from 'Thums Up' build on the "strength" of its cola and build associations as a macho drink. Ads showing the Thums Up man, riding through the desert in search of a cantina that sells Thums Up rather than drink another cola, stick in the minds of many Indians and caught the imagination of youngsters who want to be seen as men.
* From YouTube: "Taste the thunder!"
Curiously, despite the intense heat of most Indian food, no one seems to drink all that much. Every meal I have, I go through multiple glasses of water and fruit juice, gasping and sweating, and no one else even seems to take a sip. It's a wonder they aren't all dehydrated. Plus no one wears shorts, even though it's hot as can be. Ah, the inscrutable East.
Well, as you can plainly see, I have nothing of interest to report back to the colonies. Namaste. Apka din accha bite.
July 11: The Mysterious Orient
In the office where I am working, there is a sad little man (or "wallah") whose lot in life is to offer coffee and tea to visitors. He is completely silent at all times (aside from saying "Coffee or tea?"), he wears a rumpled little fancy-waiter outfit with white gloves, and he appears like clockwork every few hours. He does not offer coffee or tea to the other people who work here, only to visitors.
To date, my colleague and I (the sole visitors) have refused his offer one hundred percent of the time. Never once in over two weeks of working in this office have either of us requested coffee or tea. Yet, like Prometheus chained to his stone, forced to endure the same endlessly repeating day, he returns again and again. Neither rain nor hail nor wind nor sleet will stay him from his appointed rounds.
His expression never wavers; he is like an idol carved from dark stone. This morning I saw him in the lobby and waved, and he barely acknowledged me. Does he enjoy this task? It is impossible to say. He is inscrutable.
I woke up this morning at 5 am, and since today is my last day in Hyderabad, I figured that I should abandon my attempts to get on Indian Standard Time (IST), so I got up and went for a walk. The weather was lovely; it was the first time I have ever felt a breeze in India. Unfortunately the environment was unforgiving, and I eventually tired of walking past construction sites and returned to the hotel.
Fortunately, the hotel I've been staying in is beautiful. It's not cheap by western standards (which I supposed makes it very expensive by Indian standards), but if it wasn't sitting in the middle of a wasteland it would probably be completely unaffordable for a low-level business traveler like myself. It's all gently falling water and blonde wood and lotus blossoms and tranquil eastern tastefulness.
Which actually sets it apart from most of India. Indians never seem to have come across a color they didn't want to use immediately on their truck, apartment building or shrine. They are a jaunty people in that regard.
July 12: Arrivals and Departures
Let's say you have a friend, a friend who volunteers to drive you to the airport. But your friend drives like a crazy person; he is reckless and insane. He goes enormously fast all the time, swerving wildly between other cars and trucks, paying no heed to traffic regulations or basic auto safety. It is dangerous to ride with him.
Also, let's say that he is driving on a six-lane highway that, for some reason, goes right through a heavily-populated area, so that there are constantly people darting out into the road, and standing around inches from the hurtling cars. And this poorly-lit road is absolutely packed to the edges with all kinds of vehicles, including mopeds and tiny rickshaws with a dozen people on them and bicycles ridden by children.
Clearly you would refuse to ride with this friend. In fact, you would warn him that he was certain to be arrested by the police because of his speeding and unsafe driving habits.
But ah, it was a trick! There are no police, because you are in India. And every single person on the road drives like your crazy friend. Your stomach hurts just to see it. The ride to the airport took years off your life.
But we can make some allowances for the exuberance of the Hyderabadi drivers. After all, the monsoons have ended, and it is wedding season. Love is in the air, albeit love that was meticulously arranged ahead of time.
I have yet to be invited to a traditional wedding in India, but I am keeping my fingers crossed. I have glimpsed dozens of them, from just outside the walls, and they are magnificent. They are held in "function halls", which are a lot like Elk's Lodges, but without the overweight American grandfathers.
Each wedding is designed along the theme of "Make this space look exactly like Disneyland!". There are lanterns, strings of Christmas lights, flowers, yards of brightly-colored silk bunting, fireworks (yes! fireworks!), elaborately-decorated animals, and hundreds of people dressed in white suits and colorful outfits. The word "garish" cones to mind, but is dismissed as being unkind and unworthy.
But I have no time to crash weddings, as my work in the subcontinent has come to an end, and I must make my way, by dangerous roads, to the vimaanpattan.
So let us draw back the camera on the outskirts of Hyderabad, away from the lights and explosions and music. Back, to take in the highways and side roads filled with steely-eyed daredevils and fearless 10-year-olds. Back further still, as the gleaming ring of office towers and newly-built hotels enters the frame, and further, until we see the minarets and ancient tenements at the city's overcrowded heart. Goodnight, namaste, sleep well.
