To the new metros - I

The last couple of months have involved some travelling for me, having visited Hyderabad and Bangalore. Though these were short visits and I didn't have much of a chance to go around the cities, I still like to record impressions of places I visit.

This was my second visit to Hyderabad, though the first one is hardly worth a mention. It was a one day official trip where I barely stepped foot outside office and the hotel. This time it was a three day trip to attend a workshop at the International Institute of Information Technology or simply, IIIT Hyderabad. After barely manging to get tickets confirmed at the last minute the train journey was unremarkable, since I have seen the barren Telangana landscape dotted with rocky hillocks umpteen times. I got down at the Nampally station, which going by its size would hardly qualify to be Hyderabad's central station. For a moment, I wondered if I had got down at the wrong station. The first thing you are met with is rickshaw drivers calling out for passengers in the distinctive Hyderabadi dialect - 'Kidharku jaaneka?'.

The first thing I looked out for in the rick journey from Nampally to Gachibowli was the roads and the public transport, having had to endure the pathetic traffic conditions in Pune for a long time. The roads in Hyderabad are excellent and wide, yet I saw a couple of instances of reckless driving, which I am told is the norm. The public transport too provides good connectivity. Speaking of roads, if you thought the Mumbai-Pune Expressway was the best road to drive on, the 8-lane Jawaharlal Nehru Outer Ring Road that connects Hyderabad city to the international airport will give it a stiff challenge.

Gachibowli is around 15 km from the station, on the outskirts of the city. Its an ideal location for an academic campus, and the IIIT-H campus is a serene, green zone in the midst of the barren landscape and the concrete jungle coming around it. For Gachibowli and its surroundings are home to large IT parks coming up. A drive along the road the ISB road gives glimpses of the rocky hillocks that stretch for miles giving way to glitzy tech parks. These guys have so much barren land, I guess land acquisition wouldn't be a problem out here. On this road stands Microsoft's India Development Center, which I had a chance to visit to meet a friend. I must say its an impressive campus spanning a few low-rise buildings, with all facilities and comforts, save for lodging :).

I wanted to visit the Char-Minar, but with only one curtailed evening available it wasn't feasible to visit the old city, so I settled for visiting the Hussain Sagar Lake. At the center of the lake is the famous statue of Buddha, and it looks quite impressive with all the lighting in the evenings. The areas around the lake are a picnicking spot with gardens like the NTR Garden and Lumbini Park around. I also saw a fair with a Ferris wheel on the lakefront, quite reminiscent of the Navy Pier on the Lake Michigan in Chicago. I hung out for some time at the NTR gardens which is wonderfully landscaped and the place is abuzz with lots of people, especially kids. The next destination was the Birla Temple, which sits on a hillock just behind the NTR gardens. It was already late with 10 minutes to temple closing, so I had to hurry up the stairs to the temple at the top of the hillock. The temple shows a Rajasthani architecture made of marble, with carving from the Indian epics like the Ramayana on the walls. The main deity is Lord Balaji, and from the top you get a bird's eye-view of the city. This temple reminded me of the gigantic open air Ganapati statue-cum-temple on a hill back home in Somatna Phate, Dehu Road that overlooks the Bombay-Pune national highway. The connection between the two is that the Birlas have built both the temples. Would a trip to Hyderabad be complete without tasting the Hyderabadi Biryani? I signed off the evening with biryani at 'Barawarchi', Nampally.

More on Bangalore in the new post :)