Getting from Bangkok to Hyderabad, which is 4 hours by direct flight, instead took 26 hours with our stop in Delhi. It's nice not to have a schedule. To make a long story short, most flights on the government airlines, Air India and Indian Airlines (which were the two we used), were delayed for one reason or another. Also, Delhi's airports are a bit funny, like when they make you haul your luggage to terminal 1A outside in broad daylight on a cracked-road alley alongside donkeys and the like. Again, no stress, no worries, we just read, talked, and people-watched for a day. We finally arrived in Hyderabad to a warm welcome from Dad (Madhavi's dad), Ashok Uncle (a close family friend), Banana (Madh's uncle), and Praveen (Madh's cousin); Srini arrived an hour later: this was about 1AM which is somehow the busiest time in Hyderabad's airport, and indeed hundreds of eagerly awaiting family members were waiting outside (or inside for 60 rupees each) to greet their loved ones in the middle of the night. Ramana, the family's driver and a great guy, took us to our apartment in the heart of the city.
The family's apartment is a nice 3 bedroom flat in the Banjara Hills section of Hyderabad. It is constructed like a rock, with walls of cement painted white and a floor made of the ubiquitous gray marble of India, a country that via the state of Rajastan probably produces more marble than any other. In virtually every mid-upper class home or shop you’re walking on giant slabs of the stuff; otherwise it is just cement all around. Carpet and wood floors are never to be seen. Our bedroom is nice and comfortable, and we sleep with the fan barely spinning above, as the weather here is just about perfect. December and January are beautiful with sunshine every day, gentle breezes, and temps up to the low 80s during the day and high 60s at night.
The first few days in Hyderabad were totally easy-going and we just treated the place like home. No sight-seeing, no plans, just whatever. Unfortunately for me that meant working on this ridiculous project that I failed to wrap up back in the U.S., so I just went to work with Dad and plowed away on a computer like I was an employee - I had to use Dad's office for a while: it was great to answer the phone with "chairman here".
Over the next couple days Pallavi (Madh's sister) and Mom (Madh's mom) arrived, so the whole Dandu clan was together. At night Dad would take us out to eat, and one night was particularly notable. We went to a place called Serengeti, which has a jungle-type theme, ironic for anyone that's ever been to the surprisingly barren plain in Africa. It is one of innumerable new restaurants in town, and the food was fantastic - the best we've had outside of home in India. They prepared kebabs of lamb, chicken, and goat in such an exquisite way, dry-marinated in cumin, coriander, cardamom, ginger, ghee (rich butter), onions, and more, cooking them on a stove to perfect tenderness. It is a style developed in the North and prepared with a little extra spice here in the South.
On most days we went to the home of Banana and Pini (Madh's uncle and aunt, the former with a lingering nickname from Madh's childhood) for very good lunch - all veggie as Banana is in the midst of 41 days of ascetic preparation for a pilgrimage to Kerala to worship the god Ayappa, an increasingly popular Hindu god, especially in South India. Interestingly, this month there will be about 70 million pilgrims going to Ardh Kumbh Mela (which occurs every 12 years) in the holy rivers of northern India and maybe 50 million going to Sabarimala in Kerala (every year the temple opens for just 41 days). These are the two largest religious pilgrimages in the world (the haj to Mecca has ~3 million people each year), and they are happening in the same country at the same time! So here in Andhra Pradesh (the state we're in), many men are wearing all black, walking barefoot, eating veggie, giving to the poor, and doing about 15 other things in the ascetic tradition. How to describe Hyderabad? This is one of the most important cities in India outside of the classic big metros of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata. Alongside Bangalore (another South India city) and maybe one or two other cities, it is a true boomtown and is probably second only to Bangalore in the famous information technology sector. Hyderabad was founded, interestingly, by Persians (probably from my father's hometown in Iran) about 5 centuries ago, whose descendants (called Nizams) ruled the area even during British times and up to the time of independence. Because of that history and resulting mix of languages and religions, it feels cosmopolitan in many ways. By far the dominant culture/language is that of Madhavi's family - Telugu, but there are sections of the city that are predominantly Muslim and Urdu-speaking and there are several places that still specialize in Iranian kebabs and tea. There are also a few distinctive dishes here, notably Hyderabadi biryani, which somehow I still haven't tried.
This city is changing so fast that I can safely say that most of the modern buildings in town were built since my last visit just 3 years ago. So the trappings of the Global North are easily accessible, but one of the things that makes India so unique is that no matter how fast the economy is growing or how fast the country is modernizing, it always FEELS like India and nothing else - and this, to me, makes it a bit different from China and Thailand (the only East Asian countries we've seen though having family in India may be part of the reason for this impression, certainly). The reasons are known to those who have been here and difficult to describe for everyone else.
One small piece of that uniqueness is the India city experience. For the last week I've been going to a gym every morning, walking less than a kilometer alongside: Tata cars, Ashok Leyland rainbow-colored trucks, make-shift pick-ups with 20 people on the back, auto-rickshaws, bikes, scooters driven by women in sarees with their 6 year olds holding on from behind and their 1 year olds on their laps driving in a lane that they just created with a good honk of the horn, occasional cows or goats roaming freely (mostly on side streets), a concrete road that blends seamlessly into torn up earth beside it (this is in no way a sidewalk), mud, garbage piles, wonderful food stalls with fresh chipati or loads of bananas or steaming chai, shoesmiths, blacksmiths, construction workers tearing up any untouched earth anywhere (and the construction workers here are almost as likely to be 60 year old women, yes in sarees, as they are young men), shoeless kids running all over (more on sidestreets too), masses and masses of people and locomotives and sounds and sounds (dominated by the incessant honking which is used so that rearview mirrors don't have to be), all making for the dizzying unpredictable approach of anything at any angle from either side at any time. 
Guys, I'm exaggerating just a little here, not much. Being outside in an Indian city is near-constant sensory overload. We've been to Cairo, New York, Beijing, Bangkok, but there's nothing quite like this.
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