There and Back Again

I have not written in this blogpost for the past one month now owing to the fact that I have been away in Hyderabad. It's a nice place. Even though the sun is scorching hot and I cannot understand a word of Telugu which is the primary language spoken there. The city is a capital to two states, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Throughout my trip, I kept hearing about how there is a perennial clash between the Tamils and the Teluguites in this part of the country.

Thankfully though, the people there understand and speak Hindi adequately to spare someone like me the trouble of being lost in translation. What's more is that the people in this city are friendly and don't make you feel like 'someone from outside'.

My trip there began with watching the film, 'Queen' inside the AI flight to Hyderabad. It was a fine film. Though I had the chance to see the film before, I had left it in the middle as I sometimes have the same attention span as a goldfish. The film is about a simple Delhi girl setting out on a solo Honeymoon trip and finding herself in the process. It showed that we may be from different nations or speak in a different tongues but we all have a common heart and that is human. I loved how Rani hands Vijay (the guy who canceled their wedding) the ring and after saying 'thank you', she walks away with a smile on her face.

In the morning, I woke up in my Hotel room. It was a nice hotel but the food they offered in the breakfast was worse than most breakfast I have tasted.

I could stay at the hotel for just one day and from there I headed to the guesthouse. At the guesthouse, I had a picturesque view of the hills. Watching the sun rise from the mountains in the morning was a glorious sight. On my first weekend in Hyderabad, I decided to do some more sight seeing than just seeing the sunrise. I made a list of some famous locations to visit there. Famous locations being, Shilparamam, the KBR National Park, the Nehru Zoo, Birla Temple, Hussain Sagar lake and Charminar.

Shilparamam was a revelation. It is like an artwork every step of the way. It’s quite a large park and the whole park boasts of sculptures, statues, metal art, handi-craft comparable to the best in the country. Just the vision of so many beautiful works of art all around as you walk this park is amazing. You had the Buddha sculptures, the farmer with his cows ploughing the fields statue, animal made of machine parts and even a gigantic South Indian Gulliver in a place called the Gulliver Park within the premises. I wondered if they had missed putting up the Lilliput statues. But then it dawned on me that we were the Lilliputs they had envisioned.

Charminar was a disappointment. You’d expect the most famous landmark in the city to have some level of charm. But I guess the only place where the four letters ‘C.H.A.R.M.’ went with this place was in its original name, i.e., Charminar. The monument looked pale and dying. To add to the woe, it had a green plastic cover to wrap around one of its minarets. The only thing good perhaps was the view of the busy city one got from the top there. And the view resembled Delhi's very own Chawri Bazaar. The state government there is doing a very poor job of maintaing this heritage of theirs. Considering that any one new to the city will surely visit the site, they are leaving some really bad impression of their state’s tourism this way.

I was told by the guide taking us across the Nehru zoo on his so called ‘green ride’ that the zoological park was the Asia’s largest and the world’s seventh largest zoo. The trip on his super slow ride ended within no more than 30 minutes. And I wondered if the guide had been misguiding us all along. He told us after showing the lion in one of the cages that one of his other duties was to feed the lions and tigers there. Life of Pi came back in flashes to me as i heard this.

The Birla Temple was a shining surprise. I was not keen on visiting it. But I am glad I did. The view from the top there of the Hussain Sagar Lake was something else. We could even see a school which resembled the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft. The school building looked pretty old but grand nevertheless. I wondered if some Indian students of the mythical school were getting their education from here. The only downside, perhaps, of visiting the Birla Temple was that no photography was allowed inside the temple. So, all I could capture was the temple's view from outside.

Hussain Sagar Lake was at a stone’s throw away from the Birla Temple. The boat ride there took me to the Buddha Statue which is right in the middle of the lake on an island reminding one of the New York’s Statue of Liberty. Although the place was designed by Hazrat Hussain Shah Wali in 1562, the 18 metre high statue of Gautam Buddha towering from atop a pedestal was erected in 1992. It’s a great tribute to one of the greatest souls ever known.

I also had the chance to visit the Inorbit mall which is in Cyberabad. The purpose of the trip was to catch a movie on the second weekend of my stay there when I had nothing else to do except maybe to count stars. I saw NH10. And it was surely a good choice. It starred Anushka Sharma as a lady caught in the middle of the medieval India that exists no more than a few kilometers away from where the last mall ends in Delhi. The film showed how our society continues to live in an antediluvian mindset. Someone needs to say enough is enough. When I asked some what their take on the film was, they said that it proved to them how one should never butt in others’ business. But I think that what the film is trying to tell us is the exact opposite. We NEED TO butt in when we see something evil happening. We need to take a stand for good. As Edmund Burke once put it, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” I loved Meera (played by Anushka Sharma) telling the insane lady village head towards the end of the film, “What had to be done had to be done”.

It was great to have managed an outing to Goa as well during this trip. After a bus ride across dangerous trenches en route, me and the eight others accompanying me reached Goa after what was about 14 hours in journey. The view from the bus of the Karnataka and Maharashtra fields was incredible. I saw farmers with their cattle get to the field for work as early as 7 in the morning. That was real hard-work, I thought.

The beach was only about 5 minutes away from our place of stay in Goa. A look at the sea shore was enough to wipe away all the exhaustion. Silvery foams of the sea water were spread out like an infinite blanket. The evening sun glowed stronger than ever pouring its golden light all over the endless stretch of water. Playing with the waves of the salty sea water was all one could do. Ever aware of just how minuscule in strength we were before this great force of nature. At times one would even go down the ocean and feel the immense water take all over us. The sea breeze was amazing and inspiring. There was so much to see in this world, I thought. While we sit down in our bedrooms fretting or brooding over one thing or another, there is a party going on in some part of the world always. And it doesn’t take much to participate except perhaps a strong sense of willingness to do so. Like the Samsung guys put it’, ‘Everyone is invited.’

Goa has with it the feeling of an eternal Sunday. The people seem forever chilled like the beer cans in their hand. Whether old or young, they all seem equally carefree. I heard someone say that the Goans work only for three months in a year, i.e., during the peak travel months of October, November and December. The three months allow them to manage the entire year. If that is true, I should better start looking for a place there somewhere. But until then, being away from the maddening crowd remains something to be experienced on weekend getaways.