Sunday Morning

The Novotel is exactly the sort of place I really didn’t want to stay, but if you’re going to be in the middle of nowhere, four stars is a good way to go.  I’m out in what’s called Hi-Tech city, an area that only ten years ago was barren scrubland and squatters, and is now an area of barren scrubland and squatters punctuated by massive corporate campuses.  Google and Infosys are just down the road, and ICIC’s building rises like a glass Ayers Rock.  Every morning a stream of busses and little yellow 3-wheeled taxi drop off the thousands of works who populate the cubical farms behind the walled compounds.

After an Indian buffet breakfast, including a coriander chutney that was out of this word good, my driver took me out to Golkonda Fort.  It’s a massive structure, the outer walls of which stretch eleven kilometers in circumference.  Once the seat of power for the Turkic Qutb Shahi kings, during the 16^th and 17^th centuries it was the heart of the world’s diamond trade.  The Hope diamond came from here, which, when looking around today, is a bit of a surprise.  My driver warned me to be careful of the locals, but the only real issue was running the gauntlet of guides who were quite insistent I wouldn’t understand anything without their help.  I told them this was not an unusual for me, so I’d be fine.  What I didn’t count on was just how off the beaten track Hyderabad is.  Even the intrepid backpackers don’t make it here.  Perhaps they’re scared off by the tech companies.  Either way, it meant that a tall white guy stood out.  It surprised me at first when a group of pretty Indian high school girls all said hello and started giggling, but not long after another group came up and asked for a photo.  At one point I had five different cell phone cameras pointed at me as various friends and family stood with me to get in the picture.  Now I know how a Disney mascot feels.  At one point I started to wonder if I should be checking a mirror.  Perhaps I’d been burnt to a crisp and was glowing.  More likely it was that after six months of Canadian winter, I was whiter than anyone they’d ever seen before.  There friends will think the pictures got overexposed.

The world’s urban planners should come to Hyderabad and study what this city has accomplished in its race to develop.  Sometimes it’s best to see what not to do first.  In Hyderabad, and Indian in general, at some point every construction project it’s simply abandoned.  Sometimes it’s when work has barely begun and it’s not uncommon to see a vast empty hole where once a building was meant to go.  More often though it’s just before work is completed.  If a road is torn up to lay a new pipe, it’s never repaved.  If a building has a marble façade, the last few pieces are left shattered at its base.  Perhaps there’s some superstition around finishing a project. Even on the western style campuses, the further away you get from the main buildings, the more quality control is allowed to slip.  At the fringe of my office’s manicured gardens are abandoned bails of wire cabling, the sort that looks thick enough to be run under the ocean.

Even in the newest areas there’s a remarkable level of decay.  Between the roads and buildings there is a gap, sometimes as little as a foot, though often up to twenty feet.  This gap can only be described as a mini-apocalypse.  Regardless of how long in the past construction was completed, or how much money was spent; piles of construction detritus and garbage fill that gap.  It’s where wild animals live, and not only dogs.  Hyderabad also has wild goats.  I wonder if it has something to do with the Muslim population’s dislike for dogs.

Traffic here remains something out of Dante’s inferno.  I have never experienced anything quite like it.  And if I have, it’s been repressed.  There are no traffic signals, rules, or apparently fear of what happens when metal impacts flesh.  Perhaps it’s a form of population control.  Wives and children hang off motorcycles that weave wildly between the cars, tiny yellow three wheelers jockey for position, and once in a while you’re startled awake when there’s a brief flash of faces in your side window that are much too close, and have in fact just smashed into the car and are now lying unconscious on the road behind you.  You would think an ambulance would be called.  Apparently not.  In our case, people appeared out of nowhere, dragged the two limp men to the side of the road, picked up their motorcycle and waited.  A bit nerve racking actually.  After about five minutes the guys were sitting, a bit dazed, and slowly checking themselves over for new damage.  One was particularly upset by a torn hole in his shirt, the other seemed to have a lose tooth.  And then they were gone.  Done, just like that.

Tomorrow one of my coworkers is taking me out to a local breakfast stall for street food.  I can’t wait.