Andhra 'Meals'

Yes, rather peculiar, you might say, and I agree. I’ve been in Hyderabad for 2-and-a-half years now, and have never before tried food at a typical Andhra mess, the ones that you’ll find beside streets here and there, all over Hyderabad. But I did already have a fair idea from eating the food served at the Times Of India canteen here, and from a couple of friends’ narrations of their encounter with the Chicken Pulusu and Eguru. When my friends asked the waiter at Abhiruchi, a well known Andhra restaurant in Sec’bad which of the two is less spicy, they met with a smile, and “Sir, Andhra food, all spicy. Pulusu less gravy, Eguru more gravy (or the other way around, I’m not sure).
So, a couple of my colleagues who’re from here, and me, we went to this Andhra mess near Yusufguda checkpost. 35 bucks a plate (sorry, meals, yes, always plural), and well, I who had thought my office food was a not-so-great version of the local cuisine, found the fare much the same. Didn’t know friums (basically, some kind of hollow cylindrical fries) were Andhra food. Anyway, the dal was, as usual, heavily infused with curry leaves, and the rice and potato mash-dry-curry weren’t much of an improvement, really. The Egg curry had a mirchi-ka-salan type of gravy with one egg (not fried) floating in the middle.
As I found others eating around, one helping, two helping, three helping, four…it was again reinforced that quantity rules over quality here.
No, I’m not being a racist here and declaring all things South Indian bad, for I myself am a big fan of Utthapam, and dosa and Mysore Bonda. But make no mistake, that’s not Andhra cuisine. I also totally love the Nizami food in the Old City, the haleem, and the kebabs of Shahdab. But this typically Telugu food, friends, wasn’t quite my palate.
Good in one way, though. I could now reconcile to the quality of food in the canteen and not feel cheated for being charged 30 bucks for well…
Oh, by the way, the menu also pomised a brain something. Think I’ll avoid.

Hyd 2018: A futuristic probability

After the party yesterday night went on till 4am at the SkyBar, Shamshabad Megacity, I was still bleary eyed as I entered office. Some things about Hyderabad just don’t change, I was cursing 15 minutes later, waiting for my cab on the terrace of the Times Office. “Too much air-traffic,” the fella video-called to say. What a pain! And only yesterday the Chopper-Taxi Association held a pankha-jaam* to protest rising fuel surcharge!

From 4 years back when chopper-taxis were

 heralded as the transport solution to road-traffic, things have really gone down, I thought as I gave the pilot the address to the Goldman Sachs campus, Gachibowli Financial City. The press-conference for the inauguration of their virtual gamedrome for employees would’ve already started. As it turns out, everyone was on a half-hour lag. Mandatory retina-scan, X-ray scan and robot-controlled embedded chip detection later, I was in.

As the lights went low and I put on the projection eye gear in the press-kit, I saw a tennis court before my eyes. The mode-selection option said player or spectator and provided difficulty levels. You could choose cricket, rugby, kickboxing…oh…bungee jumping, that’s new! Pretty realistic, I’d always thought of the Microsoft Xcube that had relegated the Xbox. And of course, it’s the next best thing for keeping employees happy at the workplace, after the Sony 2nd generation mood-control chip, that is, where all you have to feel happy is select it! The Society for Prevention of Mood Alteration was of course still creating a row over chip-abuse when a bunch of geeks managed to reverse-engineer the chip to produce the feeling of being high! On the bright side, though, it took a lot of people off drugs! Personally, I’d always resisted it, though I wished I had one now to feel awake! Good old caffeine will have to do, I thought, crushing the paper-cup and putting it into one of the mini auto-recyclers that took 10 seconds to recycle and create a fresh cup. Pretty neat, the bits of technology that we don’t even notice.

On the Hyderabad Metro on my way back, the download reminder on my cellphone beeped. Yes, Samit Basu’s latest science-fiction novel, After the Big Bang, must’ve downloaded. Wonder sometime if Basu’s books would’ve been so much fun on good old paper where illustrations couldn’t animate as holographic projections. Right now, though, there was no time to read. By the time I finished speech-to-text-ing my story directly to my office computer, the metro was inside PVR. Biometric scan gave me my seat number, and I was glad to be on time. Charan Tej was doing an action flick after a long while, ever since he shifted to doing just Telugu art films. 3-d glasses on, I fast forwarded commercials, quickly browsed language options…Telugu, Hindi, English, and was set!

2 hours later, after I had had dinner and paid for it through bio-pay (biometric scan to deduct from account), I saw it raining outside and was suddenly reminded of Panjagutta 10 years back, when it looked completely different without the metro snaking its way, choppers in the sky, when traffic would be crazy and there’d be water on the street. That was then. This is now, in 2018, and I’d be home without getting wet, on the metro from the mall’s cash counter to my apartment lobby in Gachibowli in the next 3 minutes!