Hyderabad Wrap Up

Unfortunately, the rest of my trip was pretty uneventful. I had planned to head north the weekend after my Goa trip, but without taking yet more time off from work, a 2 day excursion was not worth the expense or effort. Hyderabad isn't the most well connected airport in the world, so any trip requires at least one transfer and a fairly long airport wait. I really wanted to see Darjeeling, but with a 4 to 8 hour transit from the nearest airport into Darjeeling, it just wasn't in the cards. In the end, I wound up spending my final weekend in Hyderabad, conducting interviews of potential engineering candidates. That effort paid off, at least, and I was able to settle on two candidates, one of whom has already accepted the position. In truth, the weekend was a waste of time, since all but one of the candidates who were scheduled cancelled at the last minute, but since the temps were soaring up over 110 all weekend long, I didn't really miss much by sitting in the office working.

I have to admit, however, that India started to demoralize me after a while. 2 weeks in, I was having a hard time maintaining my enthusiasm. I blame finishing "A Fine Balance" to some degree, as it made it impossible not to focus on the abject poverty that is in evidence everywhere you go in Hyderabad.

On the day that I left, I took some real photos of the slum/ghetto just underneath my hotel. Bear in mind that this is the nicest neighbourhood in Hyderabad - where all of the state government officials live. These were all shot just as the folks 'downstairs' were getting ready for the day. In all probability, all of these people have some kind of job. They are not homeless, at least not in the sense that we think of it in the US.






There's something particularly tragic about watching a child play in such conditions.


She was woken up by the rooster, who insisted on crowing right by her head.


As crappy as it looks, it wasn't for lack of caretaking by the residents. There was all kinds of sweeping and cleaning going on while breakfast was being prepared.


This guy was bathing as best he could - with absolutely no privacy and very limited access to water.


Not surprisingly, chickens weren't the only livestock wandering around the area.

And these kinds of scenes really were visible everywhere, and were far from the worst things I saw. On my final saturday night, I went for a midnight ride around the city, and everywhere I went, the one constant were the groups of people sweeping the streets clean in front of corporate office buildings. In Russia, seeing old women sweeping the streets was a common occurrence, and the fact that they had sticks cut from local trees tied to their broomsticks was something of a surprise. But in India, even the broomstick is a luxury. Everywhere you go after dark, you see women (and men) bent over at 90 degrees, sweeping the ground with handfuls of branches. Now try to imagine an economy in which providing broomsticks to your street sweepers isn't economically useful. Cheaper to just hire more poor people and let them destroy their bodies doing the meanest of manual labour.