Bears Will Attack: The Travel Diaries
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
June 4: Goodbye and Namskara
I am back at Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, waiting for my flight to Amsterdam. It's really a very nice airport, all fancy and modern. 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 pottted 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.
I'm serious. I've had it. I can't take anymore. If they serve chicken tikka curry on the plane, I will politely request two handfuls of snack peanuts instead.
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.
Mostly I'm just tired. My internal clock finally adjusted to Hyderabad time, and now I have to wrench it back to its usual biorhythms. I'm also gaining ten hours on the way home, which I neglected to factor into my plans. So instead of being home Thursday morning, I'll be home Wednesday afternoon. Which means, I guess, that I could go into work on Thursday. I have no intention to doing that, though, so if you see my boss, pretend you don't understand how time zones work.
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 indepdendent 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 Chaminar 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 tha 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.
May 31: Trouble At The Chaminar
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 old part of the city. 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 Chaminar, 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 Chaminar 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.
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 Chaminar 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 the old city were a serious bunch. 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. Somehow our driver, who we had last seen an hour earlier, found us and led us away from the mob.
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 found the driver again and 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.
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 Chaminar 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.
So glad you made it! 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 29: The Ancient 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 other lane and keep going, even though it is a certainty that there will be five other cars and 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 programmers have lived in America at some point), which is where he first learned to drive. "There are many rules for dirving in America," he said. "But here that would not work. Stop signs? No, that would not work at all. Everything would stop."
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) 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.
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtvcricket/ipl/news_story.aspx?keyword=news&id=SPOEN20080051193
The nurse who gave my my travel immunizations warned me about going out at night, since that's when the malaria-bearing mosquitos come out and inflict terrible diseases on you, but I say to hell with it. I did not see any mosquitos at the cricket grounds at Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium, although there were 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 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 25: Animated Airplanes Over Germany
High above the north Atlantic, in an aircraft larger than any vehicle I have ever set foot in, 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 tenative 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 gourmet dinner (Why does everyone else have a silverware for the main course? Was I not supposed to surrender mine after the salad and fancy little 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 embarassed 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 all but 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.
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