Hyderabad

Me: I have never been to Hyderabad.
G:Hmm.
Me: Rathi and co are there, chalna hai?
G:Kab?
Me: When you visit Bangalore next.
G: Chalo.
Me: Done.

And that's how the trip was planned. We boarded the Friday, 8th June Rajdhani. The run up to get its ticket was interesting but not that important to be written as part of this story. With a 30 min buffer, we reached the station with 30 mins to spare, so we decided to check out the Dakshin restaurant at the station. A small average crowded south Indian restaurant, its highlight is that dishes are not prepared in Karnataka style. Seeing the spicy sambhar converted me to have a masala dosa as dinner and skip the Rajdhani meal.

Our stay was arranged by Rathi inside the ISB campus. From Secunderabad, a local train followed by a nice Auto ride through the wide, traffic-less streets of Hi-Tec city brought us to the ISB gates to be stopped by about half a dozen security guards who demanded purpose, proof of our visit. Once that was settled, first thing that you notice once you enter ISB is the tall academia building at its centre and its green open campus. Away from city, away from noise, this academic campus is very well designed making it accessible by foot from anywhere.  The wind tunnel inside the main building brought back the nostalgic memory of my NSIT campus and a self note(If i ever study again in an institute, the mandatory thing to check for is a wind tunnel). And of-course CCD was also present inside the campus.

With no planning, we were faced with deluge of choices in, places to visit, to begin with but eventually decided to check out the Salar Jung museum. After about an hr or so, we were quite tired of looking at the shaan-ho-thaat of the kings. There was a small nook where we found several people gathered together waiting for something to happen, so we joined the crowd, only to find that they were all waiting for a mechanical clock to strike 2. One thing that was interesting was the sheer crowd number that had shown up to visit the museum. A proof that even though people may see it as a recreational place, it is still high in demand and affordable too. If maintained more properly, it can inspire many.

Museum was followed by a leisure walk to Charminaar. On the way i had a lemon soda made from the soda machine by a local redhi-wala, followed by those awesome small triangle samosas and a falooda; All under the brightly shining Hyderabad sun. At Charminar, we no longer could resist to our temptation to have those awesome Badamfalli mangoes. We had our late lunch at the restaurant Paradise which claims to be very authentic Biriyani place. Dinner that night was done at Chutneys after an hr long wait. Both the places were decent but nothing extra-ordinary as their fame.


Next day morning was spent leisurely at the wind tunnel reading (Rather re-reading) the Storm of Swords by GRRM. We decided to chuck all tourist related activities to avoid the Sun and spent the noon in an air-conditioned theater watching the latest Dibakar Banerjee film - Shanghai.


Main Hyderabad city is like any other Indian city  - crowded, noisy, bad drivers and dirty. But the outskirts, the Hi-Tec city, the ISB area etc  appears to be well planned. One can see the big rocks that have been blasted to make way for those glass covered buildings, one can imagine how desolate this land may have been two decades ago,  the vast expanse area may have been considered once inhabitable is now the bed of new IT solutions. 

At ISB, we checked out couple of presentations given by students as part of their bid to win the president elections for General Management. Before one girl's presentation, she is cheered with the same ferocity as you see in a UP elections, only the participants are ISB students and the scale is much smaller. Frankly after what we saw, we were appalled by the crowd and unimpressed by the presentations that we witnessed. Talking to students, it felt that people were not happy by their peers. Faculty was great, campus is good, lectures are enjoyable but peers was a common complaint. People exaggerating in their resumes appeared a common phenomenon. If this is India's answer to a global management institution, it was quite disappointing.