In love with this city, finally.
With their "jee hau, madam" and "nako hona?" and graduating from "Telegu Raadu" to "kunchum kunchum ustundi", i have finally fallen in love with this laid-back city trying to run fast.
The love affair started with the awesome platter that the city offered me every alternate weekend, on outings with the team. But the coup de grace came at the Charminar, where the myriad colors and even more varied personalities took me over by a storm. Owning close to a 20 dozen of bangles in a single trip to the old-city, i suddenly feel very rich.
The people, they have owned me. The Vara-lakshmi puja, the lehnga dressed up dolls from my apartment, who wouldn't stop raving about " how cute you are aunty, so white and so round cheeks", the house-owner who would say" how are you baby" and actually mean , " how are you , daughter", and the sheer number of people who breeze past you, their, "nako karneka aisa, baat suno, yaaron" echoing in my ears.
The one last thing that kept me from being one of them came today. We had gone for a campus recruitment to one of the Tier 3 colleges in Warangal. The sheer, undiluted honesty of those kids awed me. Never had I seen such on innocence in kids well into their tweens. On the way back,
My friends filled me up on Chiranjeevi's success story, made me appreciate NTR's song sequences and told me scripts from Telegu novels.
But having supped on an authentic Irani chai at "Cafe Blue Sea" ( where cafe is pronounced as "qaif"), with a samosa and an Osmania biscuit to boot, standing amidst of a hundreds of such others on the highly crowded streets before secunderabad railway station, then following it up with a Meetha paan, with a friend called Srinivas (if you don't have a friend called Srinivas in AP, you are the biggest loser), I can call myself a true Hyderabadi, now.
Hyderabad Chaala Boundi, guru!