“Rim jim rim jim hyderabad, rickshaw wala zindabad” these are the starting lines of a song which comes to my mind whenever i think of this city. When you are invited to 2 weddings on the same day, in two cities 700 km apart, some decision had to be made. With the decision made, we ( me, sheetalji, sudeeptaji, darshan, vishwa, kunal, chetan and sudhakar) found ourselves in Garib Rath last friday. Its called ‘Rath’ and its fully air conditioned. But it makes you feel garib – the confined spaces, the narrow seats and the side middle berth and the absence of the TTE. Though I have traveled on other trains where TTE doesnt show his face until 3 hours into the journey, in Garib rath, there was no TTE, may be Garib people dont require TTE.
Garib rath is fully air conditioned but they dont provide you any blankets, but to make sure you give some more revenues to the railways, they keep the a.c on high so that you are forced to get blankets on rent from the guy outside. By the time I woke up the next morning, I had severe cold and my nose was fully blocked and it felt like someone put a cork into my nose. Getting down at begumpet, we bought ourselves Rs.2 tickets to High-tech city – the closest local train station we could find to ‘Kukatpally’ our destination. High-tech city didn’t look high tech at all. There was few buildings here and there, but the area near the station was deserted, only a few share autos were plying. After much haggling we finally managed to get an auto to our destination. We then call ‘uncle’, soon I find out that uncle is in-fact my friends father in-law. To make matters worse, we were cozily sitting in the reception of a wrong hotel. There were two Swagath hotels and we managed to reach the wrong one. Half an hour and 3 calls to uncle and one short auto ride later we were settled in our allocated hotel. We were given vvip treatment. Normally I am used to being treated like dust on the floor, sometimes if I am lucky someone treats me like dust on a table, but i am still treated like dust. But here we were in a new city where we were treated as if we descended from the skies. There is nothing to match Indian hospitality. From literally fighting to carry our bags to ordering breakfast and coffee for us and fruit juice for one who insisted that he was on a fast, uncle did everything. What you do to make sure to-be-son-in-laws-friends-from-bangalore feel at home?
We had a cab to roam around the city. The cab driver turned out to be enthusiastic and kept a constant chatter on the things-to-see-in-hyd. Golconda, gola conda call it what you want, might have turned into just another fort on top of a hill had it not been for our guide. We buy the entry tickets for the fort – Rs 5 for indians and $10 for foreign nationals – and up comes this man from Aptdc. Even before we reached the fort gates, he was talking non-stop for five minutes. By the time we reached the top of the hill, we were exhausted more from this huge deluge of stories from the past – about Akkanna, Madanna and Ramadasu and the Qutub Shahi king. The fort itself had many interesting yet very simple things, like a wall just in front of the main gates to mitigate threat of enemy elephants attacking the door at high speed or the hole on top of the door to pour hot water on enemy elephant incase someone still dared to attack the doors or the ancient calling bell. Our guide had a peculiar way of ending any story or sentence with his own one liner, like for instance in those days labourers were not paid any money they were just provided food and shelter for their work- our guides final ending comment was ‘kaam karne walon ko sab kuch milta hai’ Or the one about a shooting scene from one hindi movie – “yehan salman, wahan bhoomika, salman ke peeche camera, camera ke peeche main !”. More than his stories and the history of the place, it was his narration which i liked and the way he added his own one-liners and comments in between 
From history to modern wacky cars. Our travel around the city on saturday took us to ‘Sudha Car museum’. Its a museum of wacky hand made cars from Brinjal car, to cricket bat car to Bed car, there was everything there. There was also the largest tricycle i have ever seen!! Extremely hungry by now having roamed around from 12 till 5 we moved on to Charminar. This entire area is so crowded it would beat the wits out of most people, but having seen ‘Ranganathan street’ in chennai during peak time many times it was a walk in the park for me. From charminar we reached Tank Bund road and roamed around Hussain Sagar. At point while we were parked on the road, CM’s motorcade went by. A stream of security cars and then finally 5 identical scorpio’s. When Darshan commented that one day he could also become CM to travel in such high security with 5 identical scorpio’s pat came the reply from our cab driver – “If you really want only that, pay me Rs 10000 one day and I will bring you 5 identical cars myself, we can zoom around in Outer Ring Road, why struggle so much and become CM? ” The day ended with a wonderful laser light show at Lumbini park with the song ‘rim jim rim jim hyderabad’ For dinner we went to ‘Chutneys’ – the food was amazing – the MLA Pesarattu, the Steamed Dosa and the variety of chutney provided was awesome.
Our vvip treatment only increased. First uncle called me to find out where were all day and how come we never called him and informed our whereabouts. Then he finally decided that he would have enough of us coming and going unannounced in a hotel room so he shifted all their family friend’s house in House no.304 in his apartment building from the hotel. I have never seen such a clean house. The aunty there kept it so well maintained and she cleaned everything. A small drop of tea fell on the floor, she immediately cleaned. There was not a spec of dust there. I felt bad just going into such a house and imagined the house i lived with my friends in 10-c Edapally, cochin . We were treated like kings and even to travel to the marriage hall hardly 2 km away we were provided cabs. The cab dropped us at the marriage hall. Tata Indigo was never meant to carry 6 passengers, but we somehow managed to squeeze into it and reach the hall in one piece.
The marriage went on well, the groom and the bride looking really beautiful as a pair. I wish both Purna and Vandana a wonderful happy married life ahead. Three cameras in hand, there was pictures galore as the artist in each one of us woke up with new angles and new avatars and poses for the photo. We bade good bye to Purna and Vandana on at least 3 different occasions, once at the Dias after the marriage, once after we had dinner and once while he was having dinner. But we still hung around. Uncle insisted on us staying back for few more minutes for a group photo. We couldnt resist. We finally managed to come back only at 11:10 in the night having reached the hall around 7 in the evening. The amount of trouble we made aunty at 304 go through because of us cannot be described as 8 of us reached her house at 11:30 and ringed the bell.
We had planned to start next day at around 7:30, atleast 8am max. But with uncle and his son not letting us go without having proper breakfast we could finally manage to leave only at 9. Birla mandir was wonderful and the sight from the top of the hill was amazing. Nawab Salar Jung has collected such a huge variety of antique art items. 2 hours is not enough to explore the vast galleries in the Salar Jung museum.
The clock struck 12 and the tiny soldier came out from door with a hammer in hand while his poor blacksmith friend kept banging the iron every second. It was a delight to watch. I am amazed at the amount of work put into the maintain this clock when my little quartz clock with all modern technology died after 6 years. The statue of ‘Rebecca’ is a prime example of marvelous art work on marble from Italy while the double statue of a man in front and woman at the back shows ingenuity in art. It was fun to see an exhibit of Salar Jung’s old school notebooks including a page from his maths note with a problem of addition of many fractions. The LCM and HCF in that page brought out a lot of memories from our school days
After a ‘Raja Bhojanam’ the group split up. While the others went off to roam the city, we – me, sheetalji and sudeepta went to ‘Snow world’. It was a first time experience for me having come from Chennai. I am amazed to see to the water parks seeing so much of fresh water, Snow world is way beyond me. It was a wonderful place, I liked it very much. As far as rides are concerned there is nothing much to do there except the 40 ft snow slide which was too bumpy for me just half hour after lunch. We had lots of fun. Its a one hour entry and around half hour time, the huge pipe on the side opened up and sprayed water and with the sub zero temperatures, we had snowfall !!! 
It was a great experience.
With my first snow fall experience I was all set to come back to Bengaluru by the Kacheguda Bengaluru express. When we planned out this just 2 days ahead of traveling to Hyderabad, we really didnt expect so much of fun. There was some unexpected drama too like in any tour – someone forgot his pair of shoes below the bed in Swagath hotel and had to go back to hotel and retrieve it. Some else lost his spectacles and he still hasnt found it.
