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!

Searching frantically for a soft spot, a cosy place to rest my head, and warmth and a heartbeat that pulses to my own, in a city that looks at me through a microscope

She calls it the "land of the ugly" I call it the "land of surprises" , well also the " land of the leches"..
The difference between the rich and the wanna-bes is stark. But you can't differentiate which Reddy is a coconut seller and which one a multi-millionaire thanks to the estate boom in Cyberabad.
All are equally rude too. A surprisingly rude city. M yet to discover the better side of being here. Hadn't resisted Delhi so much even.
What footprints will I follow that lead me from here, now.

Motion defines life. And just as I had a premonition about, there will be more movement. How sudden and how engrossing, only time will tell. But it is indeed, time to move on!

Here's my Starfish, my chocolate starfish!
A trip down the long stretched beaches of The Marina, tons and tons of sand touching the bare-foot softly and giving it a cold-massage. Tiny crabs scuttering around, tickling the feet every now and then. For sea-treasures, one does not have to dive in deep here, they are available for a price, which can be meagre only if you knew how to haggle.
But they are not the scum of the sea. They were once living creatures, which were filtering the sea-waters, cleaning the dump of the dead that the city spews into the ocean daily.
And now that these creatures are killed and marketed for someone's living, the ocean is poorer, and so are we.
There has to be a way to save both-the sea-life and the sea-men.
There HAS to be a way, I have to find it!

First bargain in a language i don't even understand!
I say, "Tamil ille!"
He says, "English ille!"

But money speaks in the same language as all over.
The Universal Tongue in the other extreme.

Just Listen!

life catches you unawares. A place we were so apprehensive about, turns out to be friendlier than we had ever imagined. Or is it just prima-facie? Food, there sincerest desire, is well-satiated here. This place is a food-lover's haven.
It is soul-stirring to be able to connect to the thoughts and feelings of a flower-vendor woman who hankers after you to buy a string of jasmines, mumbling undecipherables. But you know exactly what she means. And it is quite funny when you ask for a glass of juice and the juice-wala picks up every fruit to confirm whether this is the one you asked for.
The saddest part is when you can't haggle and pay dearly.
The cake however goes to the sign-boards. You got to, ought to learn the language, you know!