Getting Around Hyderabad

The roads in Hyderabad betray the fast growth of the city – the few main roads that were ever asphalted are big construction works as flyovers are being built to carry the ever growing traffic through the city. The other roads were always overlooked and it feels it.

The press of traffic is immense. And incredibly noisy, like being in Napoli. For the same reason too – everyone hoots their horns when overtaking. But here they also hoot to squeeze by in the jams, ward of others and, I suspect, as a vocal talisman to ward off ‘attacks’ by other vehicles.

The best way to get around Hyderabad is by motorino (scooter). Most everyone has one – its almost like being in southern Italy. Using helmets is discretional. Ganesh has one, which, since I was passenger, left me enjoying the wind blowing through my hair – first time I’ve done that on a bike since I was 25. All I could think about was avoiding a crash…

The second best way of getting around is by auto rickshaw – a motorized trike with the driver up front and the passengers sitting on a bench covered by a black vinyl hood. Thousands of them. Great way to go when doing some shopping. 

Then again, you can always drive, lacing your way between the motorini, rickshaws, taxis, cars, vans, trucks and buses. Best yet, get a professional driver to do it for you. 

As you all know, I’ve been to many places and I’ve driven in most of them. So I’m used to all styles, standards and systems of getting around by bike and car. There are some special places in the world where it’s a wonder how there are no pile-ups at every corner. Cairo, Casablanca and Cebu come to mind.

Hyderabad takes the prize for being the most challenging. Not just because India, like many British ex-colonies, drives on the not-right side of the road. It’s the sheer oblivion that possesses a driver that stuns me. Nowhere else have I ever seen a more complete disregard for other people on the road. Other cars, trucks, vans, bikes and even pedestrians are apparently just don’t register. 

One night, riding on the motorino with Ganesh, just in front of us one guy decided to cross the front. The only problem was that there was another motorbiker in front of us too. Neither of them was aware of the other until it was almost too late. Did either of them react? Did the biker, not going particularly fast in any case, stop or swerve? Did the pedestrian run for his life? No, on both accounts. Result: one pedestrian found himself over the handlebars of the bike in the chest of the biker. The biker lost control and both went flying – hard. I think they made it, but for sure they were knocked out. Too many people came rushing from the sidewalks for Ganesh to feel it to be useful to stop. He was right.

People just pull out of side roads in the middle of the main traffic. Others go the wrong way up a divided highway (one truck managed to skewer itself on the divider itself, stopping 20 meters in with its entire underside ripped out). Careful drivers like Ganesh find themselves overtaken on all sides – and crossways for good measure. And the bigger the vehicle, the more abrupt in just pulling out, changing lanes, stopping, whatever. I thought I’d seen everything till I came here.

The showstopper was being driven by night. One day I went down to Machulipatnam, near the Gulf of Madras (see other blog). This was a long voyage down and an equally long voyage up to Hyderabad. The morning trip had all the ‘normal’ stuff. The night trip was a nightmare. Most vehicles are badly maintained (correction: erratically maintained). Which means no lights. Or worse, no guarantee of lights. Now put it all together. The oblivion of daytime driving - in the oblivion of the night. Terrifying.

This part of India is booming, so the roads are full of trucks: mechanical matadors overtaking slower vehicles and challenging every oncomer. I had to close my eyes and simply seek my own oblivion by sleeping with half an eye on the traffic, fully expecting not to make it back. Thank goodness for the professional driver. Never, never, will I drive or be driven by night in India again. Never.

Mumbai’s traffic felt positively civilized by compar-ison. Manic driving as always but done by ‘city folk’ so there is some logic in it at least.

Hyderabad's traffic beggars description.

India 02

Impressions of Hyderabad

I flew in to Hyderabad in the evening of April 8th. My friend Ganesh picked me up at the impressively new airport in his new car, driver attached. Since it was almost dark and we were talking most of the time I didn’t really see much of the city – that had to wait until the following day.

Looking down as we were landing, what struck me the most was how similar the scenery from above looked like the flatter region around Sao Paulo in Brasil, where I had been only the month before. Same greenness, same small towns splattered around a large metropolis, same red earth, same air pollution – that tobacco colored air I’ve seen in too many places now not to be convinced most air pollution comes from vehicles.

During all my stay here I kept coming back to the similarities between the India I was seeing and the Brasil I know. Not for the culture – that’s totally different – but for the way people were building and dealing with their new world. There’s a considerable difference in the degree of sophistication of living too (Brasil is way ahead), but the basics are the same: small, fast growing, youthful middle class showing off their success through material acquisitions, living off a much larger base of poor people.

All of which shows in the construction of new houses and developments (called “colonies” in the old style here), the press of new SUVs and town cars, the (re)building of the road network – and the new airport.



I didn’t actually see much of Hyderabad and Secunderabad. Well I did, but I didn’t get to see the “sights” as Ganesh couldn’t really find the time and, with time running out for the fotoshoot I was going to do for him, I didn’t get the time either. The amount of time it takes to get the simplest things done reminded me of Brasil too – like buying office goods, some DIY materials, stationery etc.

One thing that stands out is the big lake that separates Secunderabad from Hyderabad. A ring road around it (called the “necklace”) takes you past a Hindu temple, a Christian church, a mosque and a giant statue of Buddha that floats on a pontoon just offshore and which is lit up at night. Rounding that you come to a luna park, a strip of eateries and a garden park where people stroll around in the evening. Then you pass a settlement populated mostly by some cattle and their tenders, some up-scale restaurants (very good too) and the back quarters of Hyderabad that merge into the back quarters of Secunderabad.

One other things stands out in my memory: the wonderfully ludicrous gilded statues of local politicians. I don't mean the painted plaster statues of past national leaders. I mean the delightfully gauche, literally self-aggrandizing statues of the local bunch that are planted in the middle of roundabouts. Evidently you have made it if you can get your political supporters to set one up for you. And the more powerful you get, the bigger your statue will be. These are today's Pharaohs, to borrow another civilization for a moment. One day I'm sure someone will challenge the Buddha for pre-eminence.

When you read travel accounts from India, most people talk about it being dirty. Well what I saw isn’t clean, that’s for sure, at least not for the most part. But I know that in tropical climates it is almost impossible to keep things with the aspect of fresh paint – the humidity and the power of the sun speckles every building surface with a patina of age and wear within a week.

What I noticed was something else – an almost complete lack of maintenance of anything. Hardly anything seems finished (and I don’t mean its obviously in the process of being finished). That which is seems badly finished – like the paint on the wall that also covers the skirting board when it shouldn’t.

The office and house cleaners are supposed to clean, right? Well, they sweep, but I never saw anyone washing anything. There is an accumulation of grime that almost matches the dirt of English and Italian trains. And everyone seems to live in this without a murmur.

Is there trash in the streets? Yes there is, but the street sweepers are out every night at midnight to keep the roads clean. The problem is I don’t remember seeing the trash collectors. So, beside the entrance to many a building, there is a heap of road detritus. Nothing I haven’t seen in many a fast growing city in the developing world – and less than the mountains of uncollected trash in Napoli. The logistical challenges the mayor of such a city faces must be almost insurmountable.

There is a high-tech area of semi high-rise and office buildings assembled from kits. These are where the call centers and programming companies are located, either side of a four lane highway rushing on to who knows where. Dotted around the strip, in isolated clusters of “colonies”, the new middle class is building their apartment complexes and villas. Most are in a modern pseudo Latin style, without the style. The more imaginative few I saw have a deep overhang to shade terraces from the fierce sun, a slightly kitsch Indian flourish. The property market, need to say is booming to the point of bubble.

There are no squares here, no obvious sense of being in the center of somewhere. In Secunderabad there is Gandhi Square, but its really an intersection of three rods with a barricaded strip of once-green with a statue of Mohandas Gandhi in it. I don’t know if the lack of squares is thanks to English influence (Secunderabad was their “cantonment”, built to keep a watch on the Nizam of Hyderabad) or Moslem one (Hyderabad being built by Shia Mughal conquerors). Neither of those cultures ever much thought about building plaza and piazzas. Maybe original Indian culture didn’t either – I don’t know and no-one could tell me.


There are the beginnings of shopping malls, but nothing like in the West or in Latin America as there are no well-established suburban areas yet that stimulate such developments. Here, from what I saw, there are some mini-malls, mostly consisting of clothing stores (Van Heusen and Louis Philippe seem to be the most popular) and restaurants. These malls are almost totally disconnected from other shopping areas – more the fruit of an individual developer than anything else.

In fact there are no “high streets” in the sense of streets with sidewalks and stores at all. As anyone who has traveled or lived in other tropical countries knows, this has nothing to do with the climate, intensely hot though it is. It has everything to do with history.

I get the impression that, here at least, the English did not attempt to create a city. There are a few remnants of stores and townhouses built in the 1920s through 1950s, now abandoned or crumbled by successive occupants. God knows that the original conquerors of most of these parts never even thought of the idea. And, once independent, India crippled itself economically with going anti-capitalist as a reaction to its English overlords.

But ironically, the Englishness still remains, beyond driving on the left. I was invited to party in Hyderabad’s most exclusive club. It’s the old British military club, green lawns and all. The bricks are red, the arches are pitched just so; the pillars of the covered passageways are of timber, the roofs of wooden shingle with a pointed cut. All rigorously painted cricket green. I couldn’t resist looking for the orange squash and lime (they served Pepsi). The “last call” for ordering alcohol in the restaurants and bars is 10:45pm – just as in England until recently. The bars close at midnight. So, stupidly, do the discos. When people leave home, they go “off station”. The books of accounts are printed in a style I haven’t seen since I was a child at school in Australia. Society stills reflects Englishisms too, but I’ll come to that later.

Incredible. The history of India before the arrival of the English was all about trade and commerce. And it made the country rich (well, some of its people anyway). Then the English arrived and hijacked the Indian economy to make themselves the richest nation on earth. And when they were forced out, what did the Indians do? They threw away the bases of wealth creation and kept the frivolous, irrelevant outward trappings instead.

Sixty years on, it shows in how much they have to do to recover their lost position of privilege and power. They are on their way. Good for the Indians!

The Next Adventure

Another month, another country.  Or so it seems this year.  

I left off blogging when in Iraq because at the end there was very little to say. Or more precisely, there was, and is, a lot I saw and wanted to say related to what I was seeing, but the greater part was work related - and that is boring to most readers and also not useful to those who would have read and understood.  Plus there was almost no situation in which I could go to the places I wanted, or take the photos to share with you.  So everything is in my memory.  Maybe in a little while I'll do a summary on it all.

Meanwhile, before getting to where I am now, I had the sheerly unpredictable amusement and bemusement of finding myself rolled back into working with the company I had worked with in 2005/2006.  In consequence I've just spent three weeks in the US (and 3 days in Brasil) working on an interesting new project.  Now they all have to do somethings I'm back to what I intended for myself.

I am in India!

Last time I was here, I was nine years old (February 1966) and we were sailing in a cruise liner from Australia to Italy.  We put into Bombay for a night - and of course we went ashore.  I can still remember almost everything - the warm humid night, the dark shadows sundered by the rich primary colors of saris, the suffusion of scents and smells, cracked streets crushed by people shopping even in the evening, the desperately poor children.  I remember the squared, holed and dentellated coins and the same exuberant differentness of the Gate of India by the sea.

Now I am in Mumbai's airport, waiting for a connection to Hyderabad, where I am going to rest a bit, help a friend with his business plan and, ironically, see what I can do to move MSGI business in the region.

And, of course, like all airports in the Middle East and Asia, there's free WiFi - unlike in Europe and US (could they learn a trick or two in marketing please?)  So I can write and post this.  

My journal is back in business!

Lazy Days

Well the reason I haven’t posted anything in the last few days is that there really isn’t much to tell.

Sunrise over my place
I have been in the base camp all the time, where nothing much happens at all.

I’ve been invited twice to dinners to celebrate a birthday and a departure. That I appreciate as it breaks the monotony of the time here and it was a moment when I could see some of the people unwind a little.

Other than that, I wander around the camp, feeling rather like a Russian dissident consigned to a none too rigorous exile in Siberia. The weather is different of course. But the warm sunny days are becoming cooler; a fresh wind blows from the north west. Dawns are beautiful. Some are a liquid indigo that azures as the sun rises, others are mixed with fine muslin clouds that tingle with a saffron-pink glow as the rays touch them.

The drivers and their workers start their shift at 05:45. Since I now know most of them, and since working hours are equally shifted to the early morning here, I’m often up to say good morning and wave them off. Then its breakfast by 06:15, clean up the room and hit the office by 7 am. When I’m in camp, most of what I need to do here I’ve done by 9 am, the rest of the time being taken up by wandering around and seeing what people are up to. In the evening I watch a movie I downloaded earlier. Tomorrow I’ll go out again to tour the base (thank goodness).

I’m sitting now under the covered patio by the cabin I’m staying in. To my left is a small garden with a green lawn, shaded by a simple cloth canopy. A couple of young palm trees frame my view over the parking lot.

I’ve missed taking fotos of two really beautiful dawns and one good sunset. Time to take out the camera and post a couple of pics!

Sunrise over the perimeter fence