If the 60s are the 40s then we are celebrating India’s 47th Republic Day and we can still plan the next 50 years and more. In 1995 there was no Cyberabad and the farthest point that side was maybe COD on today’s Road 36. As for BHEL or ICRISAT, one felt one needed a visa to get there.
Where have all the years gone by, we can well ask. The year 2014 just sped by and almost a month of 2015 is speeding by. So let’s halt and take one day at a time and make it count. What about writing a two-line summary about each month in 2015 highlighting an important day/ event?
Maybe in January it is the Hyderabad Literary Festival on 24, 25 and 26, at the Hyderabad Public School. It’s free for all and if you don’t get there, you have only yourself to blame. Perhaps 2015 can be the year we fully explore Hyderabad and there’s so much to explore, to eat / to feel/ to see. Huma Kidwai’s Book titled Hussaini Alam House most certainly based on Chowmahalla Palace (even the photograph on the cover is of Chowmahalla) gives us a depth of the Hyderabad that is fast disappearing in front of our eyes. Yet we feel lazy even to go and see Charminar or Golconda fort. This writer has actually met people who have never been to these monuments.
Feeling lazy means we are not motivated? Getting up early morning to go to the gym or yoga or take a walk means that you have to leave a warm bed and brave whatever you have to brave. Some people keep the cell phone and its alarm far away as there’s nothing peskier than a cell alarm which goes on and on. Even the buzzing mosquito is better as you can swat it away! But once you have risen and got the pleasures of an early morning work out, what bliss!
Early mornings in KBR nowadays is sheer cold weather. Some say its 7 degrees! In Hyderabad? Most people who do not wear gloves make gloves out of their own sleeves. Then of course one sees the just returned Vassar graduate in shorts and singlet amazed at citizens feeling cold. After all what is this weather compared to New England winters? Have you noticed, there seems to be such snobbishness about weather: ‘Our winters get really cold etc as compared to poor Madras (oops Chennai) which only gets hot, hotter and finally hottest.’
There is a kind of snobbery among westerners as to how much hot weather and hot cuisine they can stomach. For that matter we too pride ourselves on how much chilly we can tolerate. There seems to be a macho thing about how hot the food can get. While the person who says he or she cannot tolerate chilly is seen as weak-kneed?
Would it be finally fair to say there are no tolerant people? The tolerant are intolerant of the intolerant.
