Our Whirlwind Trip to Hyderabad

(giggle)

So I told you last week that we were going to Hyderabad to visit a family friend's family for Thanksgiving .... so, like most of our adventures here, things were a little different than what we had originally expected.

We met with Allen's brother's work colleague - but he wasn't staying with his family - he was on a business trip and was the guest of a very important person and was staying at the equivalent of the an officer's club. So we were guests of the guest of a very important person and were able to bask in the warming glow of that hospitality for an amazing four days. This included having access to a car and driver - which was crucial because Hyderabad seems to have grown without much concern for city planning.

Where we were staying

My dad would be proud of our little adventure - we were waking up most days before 7am and having a very Indian dinner around 10pm... all the better to pack in as much as possible into the day! Sadly, at several of the sights we saw, I wasn't allowed to take pictures - but here's the rough outline of what we did:

Akber Miya Brother's Tabla Shop (see photo for contact details)

The elder brother, Nasim, talked to Allen for several hours and seemed very proud of Allen's interest in their work. The conversation seemed to reaffirm the idea that while all of the parts that make up a tabla come from all over the country (copper shells from Mumbai, rosewood from Uttar Pradesh, laces from Puna, etc) it is the maker who gives the tabla its city of origin.

Charminar

The crowds from the bazaar sort of spilled into this area - so we didn't get to spend as much time here as we would have liked. But there were great views of the old city and a wonderful cooling breeze.

Thanksgiving in Paradise (restaurant)

This is THE biryani place in Hyderabad... the one the locals take you to if you want the authentic local fare. While mutton biryani isn't exactly a typical Thanksgiving meal, after a long day of racing around all over town, it was very welcome and appreciated.

Birla Mandir Temple

A beautiful white Rajasthani marble temple dedicated to Lord Venkateshwara. It is up high on a mountain so you have amazing views of Hyderabad and Secunderabad. No photography is allowed, which was perfectly fine by us ... it kept the grounds as a real quiet sanctuary as opposed to just another tourist spot.

Ramoji Film City

About an hour out of the main city this place was a cross between Disneyland, Universal Studios, and a local county fair... it even had its own version of "Its a Small World" only all the characters were white ... no joke (video clip below)

It was just a little too over-done for us: too showy, too elaborate, too forced to recreate a "studio" where "big Bollywood productions" were shot ... if that was really the case would they have really let a bunch of middle-schoolers run around during shots?


Maybe it was all the middle schoolers that put us off - but after hanging around for a couple of hours and taking the tour of the old "sets" we were ready to come back to town.

Salar Jung Museum

What a strange place, it really was more of a personal collection of artifacts than a museum per say ... but was definitely worth the time we spent exploring it.... we saw an old musical clock and a statue that viewed from the front was of a man and viewed from the back was a woman... there was tons of Western art as well as India ... it really was quite an eccentric bunch of artifacts. We were told that when the gems and jewelery are on display it is a real sight.

Hitec City (Cyberabad)

If Bangaluru is India's home-grown tech capital than Hitec city is the foreign equivalent... Apparently Microsoft kicked off the foreign migration by investing in a 150-acre campus and others started following suit: we saw big names in American tech but saw several international banking firms as well, so it was pretty mixed bag. Following on earlier posts I've written about disparities here in India the Cyberabad vs Hyderabad distinction was too stark not to comment on: whereas the old city was so crowded and congested that it could easily take an hour to cross town by car ... Hitec city's streets were large, free of pot holes, and almost entirely empty. There were no street stalls, or restaurants, or stores of any kind. The campuses were intended to be self-sufficient (no need to leave the bubble)... So what happens to all the workers who currently live by all construction their working on? Those that stay on as janitorial staff will be bussed in from the city.

To be honest, the whole thing left us a little uncomfortable - on the one hand it seems that foreign investment has been able to make huge infrastructure improvements all while weeding through India's bureaucracy ... but, this infrastructure is for their employees, those lucky enough to work there. It really brought home a comment a colleague made to me recently that most of India is not feeling the impact of the technology boom that the rest of the world is remarking on. I'll admit that before moving to India, I knew only what was projected of India on the world stage: nuclear power, struggles with Pakistan, some trouble with domestic extremism, but a powerful economy and a growing middle class. The reality on the ground - from what I can tell - looks much different. The middle class I had been told about looks virtually non-existent (I'm told most of them emigrate to the UK, US, or Canada) ... the tech-boom is clearly not dispersed but for very specific city centers - and it seems hard to think how it could be otherwise given the state of public education in rural districts... Just really makes you think - how much does anyone really know about the countries we read about in the papers? How can anyone know, governments (especially) included, even know their own countries?

I digress

Jubilee Hills
This is one of the up-and-coming neighborhoods close to Hitec city... we went to a little park off the lake and (because we were there so early - 9am) we actually ran into a film shoot going on. I was able to take that very sneaky photo ... but it was for a Telugu film "Takita Takita" so keep any eye out for it back in the States.

Golconda Fort

Easily our favorite part of the trip.... it had been the capital of the State of Telangana before it was abandoned because of a water shortage. It was beautiful there - clearly a lot of effort has been taken to keep the grounds looking attractive because we saw many local families just relaxing and picnicking ... clean, comfortable, green public space was just something I had yet to see in India. It was a real oasis.

And last but not least

Dinner at Chutneys
You in the mood for a dosa and want at least four chutneys to choose from as condiments? Then this is your place. They are a super-popular, quasi-fast-food, joint with pretty outstanding food... Allen got a mint dosa and I got a garlic dosa --- quite a match, but both were a great treat for our last night in town.

So (if you've read to the end), this was a quick summary of our jam-packed weekend in Hyderabad. I think we both agree it is a place we would be more than happy to come back to. We're secretly hoping that this description of our trip will convince Allen's brother to take a business trip to Hyderabad so that we can go visit him there...

(wink, wink, nudge, nudge)

Happy Thanksgiving!

We know we're early - but we will be in Hyderabad over the Thanksgiving holiday, visiting the family of a family-friend (yeah!), and so don't expect to be linked (read: chained) to the internet like we normally are...

But we wanted to tell you all how thankful we were for all of your love and support. It is really hard being away from family and friends at the start of the holiday season... knowing about all the things we'll be missing .... the gatherings, the smell of cinnamon on everything, the leaves changing color*, the crispness in the air, and least we forget - the excuse to eat lots of pie.

But we think this year especially, we're feeling thankful for all the things we've taken for granted in the States... of the many privileges we've been afforded in our lives and never truly stopped to appreciate and think about how lucky we are. So thank you for the freedoms we've benefited from. And thank you for the rights we have grown accustomed to. And most of all thank you for our understanding of the responsibility we have to our fellow global citizens, for the knowledge of how best to help, and for the strength do what is right.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!!!!


*Thank you Allen's mom for the Blue Ridge Mountain leaves you included in your care package. That was a stroke of genius!

What your cell phone's dictionary says about where you live...

Generally I find that most cell phone's predictive dictionaries have some of the most random words... but this was a first for us. Also, Allen's name makes the dictionary as well ... coincidence .....?

Two Lucknows (3): Food Made by Love

*First, apologies for disappearing for a little bit --- so many things have been happening that it has been hard finding time to keep all the updates coming in a timely fashion. Long story short: Allen is still plugging away at his Urdu, tabla-playing, and tabla-making classes ... Nikki is studying Hindi, is almost 90% sure she's moving to Bangalore for an internship in the spring, and last week visited several farming villages near Lucknow - and is full of stories (if you can imagine).... but enough about all that - hopefully I'll be able to put up posts with more details on each in the coming week, before we head to Hyderabad for Thanksgiving.

So, the point of this post is to continue with this series of posts I started to show some of the huge dichotomies that are everywhere visible when you're living in India ... I'm not trying to put too much judgment into these posts - but just point out differences that, I feel, in the States we take for granted.

It shouldn't be a big surprise to most of you that it is fairly typical to have hired-help when you live in this country.... I mean, there is a grammatical construction for the presence of servants built into the language for crying out loud (more on that later)! Given the available labor force (huge!) people will take work to pay bills - period. Just for some perspective - at my office we were hiring a gender specialist and a monitoring and evaluation specialist ... and we were getting applications from people with PhDs in management and sales (unrelated fields) because they need the work ... it doesn't matter what the job is...

I digress... it is not uncommon to have a maid and a cook. So we, and the other American students in our building chipped in to split the services of a maid and a cook. Every Sunday through Thursday we go to bed content with full bellies from Love's cooking - yes, our cook's name means Love. I've always said that food made with love is the best - but I didn't know how true that was until I started eating food made BY Love. Needless to say, we're all very very fond of him. He's always so respectful, earnest, helpful and generally pleasant to be around. We laugh because he calls us the bare bacche (the big children) because he has to correct us on what vegetables go best together and what spices to buy --- but always in a friendly, sort of fatherly way.

We found Love through our Landlords -- we had mentioned to them (back before our relationship with them had soured) that we were in need of a cook and they quickly mentioned Love, he was the best because he was their cook. Timing wasn't an issue because he was their Alfred (re: Batman reference) ... a 'butler', but that word doesn't seem right for India, but calling him a man-servant sounds derogatory ... Love is their go-to guy... he was with their family 24/7, but was "rented" out to another family in the mornings to cook their lunches (to bring to work), he was "rented" to us around 6-ish for our dinner, then he came back to the Landlord's around 9pm to make them dinner.*
*Side note: Most Indian's eat absurdly late, around 9pm to 11pm because many of them don't get off work until 8pm. Sounds nuts right! Then you consider that most offices don't open their doors until 10am and most business don't open until 11am and it all starts to make (crazy) sense.

Note, that I said Love was "rented," that's important and comes up later.

So the end of our first month came and we were happy to hand Love his agreed to wages (not much by US standards, but a solid month's work here) ... when we tried to hand him the money he said "no" that it had to go through the Landlords. We had been told that, but we didn't see the harm in giving him the money directly. I don't know who/how it was asked, but we subsequently found out that Love was only given 1/4 of the salary we had agreed to pay HIM, the other 3/4 went to the Landlords for the use of Love's time.

We were stunned. We're really angry at our Landlords for cheating Love out of money we intended to pay HIM and also at a class system that can justify this type of treatment of other humans. Love is not a self-employed man who happens to help out the Landlord's family: he is their man and they decide how he spends his time and who he works for. While we were all initially very angry about the reality of this situation we'd entered into there was a split amongst our group as to how to deal with this new knowledge. On one side, it was suggested that the best way to respond would be to openly acknowledge our disapproval of how Love was being treated and demand that the entirety of the money that was intended for him be given to him. Essentially, turn the culture clash into an actual clash. The other side (which was echoed by the advice given to us by the Director of the Institute) was of temperance: fighting for his right to the money might only get him in trouble with the Landlords - and while our time in India was less than a year, this was his life and his livelihood we were meddling in. My biggest fear was that they would just tell him not to come to us anymore and just tell us that "he left" ... while he was working for us and seeing us on a regular basis, we could always give him his proper wages through gifts for his five-year old son, through our respect for him as a person, and for our very voluble appreciation for his skills... if they told him not to come, there would be no way for us to find him again and help him (modestly) in these ways.

It has been a while since this first came up - but it is hard to know whether we're doing the right thing. We think we are, that our motives aren't too selfish, that maybe... just maybe we are making a positive impact on his life. But we don't really know: Love is too much of the consummate professional to gossip or share his complaints about his lot in life...
"His lot in life" ... that is such a trope in the US, but we really do take for granted how mobile our society is. Yes, too many people still feel the sting of racism and class is a large determining factor in terms of what types of opportunities you have available to you .... but living in India, a greater percentage of the population here (than in the States) doesn't have any choice about what strata of society they live in. There is no mobility.

Love, by every indication seems like a literate, neat, well-fed man --- not properly middle-class, but doing very well for himself, from what I can tell. But what about the street children? Or the rickshaw-wallahs? Or the road workers wearing only plastic sandals? Or people without proper shelter at night? How can they "make-it"? What chance at upward mobility do they have? What is preventing all the Landlords of India from taking 3/4 of their wages? What social pressure is stopping this from happening, from people being taken advantage of? When labor is a dime (literally) a dozen - why will anyone fight back, when the Landlords of India will just find someone to work for them for cheaper and with less complaints? What can one do when this is the norm?

Follow up from yesterday's post about the fog ... now the rain...

So it seems the sky couldn't hold any more condensation nuclei, and so finally shed some of the pollutants with a light drizzle this morning.

Lucknow 9-24-2009 and 11-08-2009

Lucknow 11-12-2009 (today)

How do you get about town on the scooter in the rain, you might ask ....
Easily!

First, wrap your head in a scarf for warmth... bonus if it makes your helmet snugger...

Next, put on two coats, the bigger, the baggier, the better ... if people mistake you for a man at first glance, then you're doing it right

I really need to do an updated post about traffic in India - I'm trying to get the wording right so I don't scare my mom too much ... but things that really struck me about driving in the rain today included:
- Much less traffic, since it has to be nearly 70% of the traffic here in Lucknow is scooters/motorcycles/bikes/cycle-rickshaws people just decided to stay home rather than go to work.
- I was warned by the guards on my way out of the building this morning that I had my light ON... since it is daylight out, why would you need your lights on?

Fortunately it wasn't very heavy rain - otherwise I would have wished I had had wipers on my helmet ... and Allen is mentioning (as he's reading this post over my shoulder) that heavy rains cause the open sewers to flood ... and well, yes, I wouldn't have liked driving in that much at all. Don't know how much scrubbing I would need to feel clean after driving in that.

The Two Lucknows (2): The "Fog"

Lucknow 9-24-2009 and 11-08-2009

This is the view from our apartment window now that "winter" has set in in earnest (highs are in the 80/90 degrees, and lows in the 60s). With the "winter" comes the "fog". It isn't like any fog I've experienced at other times of my life --- it seems to hang around regardless of how hot it is or whether the sun is out (see the above picture which was taken near noon). This fog isn't wet (there hasn't been rain here for a while). This fog isn't cold (although, I imagine locals think it is cold, relatively speaking). This fog also does not hang near the ground - it seems to be hanging in just over our heads.... which leads me, and several other Americans staying here - I might add, to believe that this is not fog.

Wikipedia, my go to source for general explanations, suggests that:
"Fog formation requires all of the elements that normal cloud formation requires, the most important being condensation nuclei, in the form of dust, aerosols, pollutants, etc., for the water to condense upon. When there are exceptional amounts of condensation nuclei present, especially hygroscopic (water seeking) particles such as salt, then the water vapor may condense below 100% relative humidity." [emphasis added]

To me, this "fog" isn't fog in the sense that I've seen it most of my life, but rather is the (rather nasty) after affects of people burning garbage for warmth now that the weather has gotten colder.... yes, let that one sink in a little bit...

Some of you may remember our description of Delhi when we came in January, how we were totally overwhelmed by the pollution that everyone was calling "fog"... I just couldn't understand at the time where it was all coming from ... I didn't have the 100+ degree weather during September to force onto my understanding just how "cold" this 60 degree winter must be for people without decent shelters.

Shanty-town on Bulter Road

On my way to work everyday I pass by this pretty enormous shanty-town ... so un-PC of me, but I'm not sure what word to use. These are temporary structures to be sure, but I don't know what kinds of rights these people have to the land they are living on ... but similarly not 50 yards away there are several families that just sleep in the open air on the side of the road ... which is amazingly dangerous considering there are no proper sidewalks here (more on that some other time).

In the morning, I frequently see morning fires for breakfast and in the evening I see fires for dinner. In a big city, at first it is hard to imagine where they must be getting their fuel - there aren't really any trees around for firewood.... and then you just look around, and it becomes clear... sad, but clear.

Huge piles of garbage on the side of the road

I'm puttering on my little scooter and going to the nice part of town ... to work in buildings like this:

(Sadly) Typical Gomti Nagar view, palacial house next to hovel

I say scenes like this are typical - but it may be the case that as all the construction in Gomti Nagar starts dying down there will be less "mixing" of these classes ... as the construction laborers are moved out (have palaces built on the plots that once use to be their homes), so their homes will be moved to the fringes of these neighborhoods. I don't really know if this is true or what will really happen... I only know what we can see in the moment, which is just some pretty intense contrast between the haves and the have-nots.

But I don't want to leave you with the impression that it is just the underpriviledged who burn trash - I was stunned to see yesterday that the Taj Residency Hotel (Lucknow's fanciest hotel) burning garbage in the back on their grounds. So garbage burning is not solely done for warmth/cooking fires ... but also to just deal with trash.

Sad.

Reminds me of something Allen heard the other day .... India is a "free country" meaning, there are no rules to prevent you from doing anything you want - but that said, if you want something done properly you're going to have to do it yourself... no proper city sanitation and garbage disposal? No problem, just burn the waste in your back yard..... it is exhausting to be fighting against a world with no rules - so at some point, you just stop trying and just do what everyone else does.

[UPDATE: Allen wants to point out that he doesn't believe that people are cooking on garbage fires .... he thinks garbage fires are just for disposal and that during the summer, the rains clear the air and because it doesn't rain much in the winter we don't have that cleaning effect, so the smog builds up over time.
COUNTERPOINT: I totally agree with his point about the rains. But I think there are more fires now than there were in the summer just because of the temperature drop. And while I'll concede that they might not use refuse for cooking fires, but they most definitely are using old newspaper and scrap tinder-material from the garbage piles -- I think.]

One-sided Conversation: So how are you all doing?

I can't tell you the number of times, since first moving to Lucknow, that I've wished for cameras built into my eyes. There are always so many things that take be by surprise or that I want to share. I've got about 50 posts mulling in my head at any given moment and I'm just waiting to capture photographic "proof" before sharing it with you all (so maybe it is better for you that I don't have cameras in my eyes....)

But I'm also realizing that this blog is (naturally) a sort of one-sided conversation ---- you guys here all about how/what we're doing ... but we're missing out on what is going on back home.

Please send us your stories! Let us know what we're missing (because we are missing you all so much!) Your lives are important to us and we are hoping that in this case the limited news we've gotten from the States means your all happy and healthy!

WE MISS YOU!