Chowing down in Hyderabad

Before I left on my first trip to India, I was warned by one of my Indian friends that the food is spicy.  "I've eaten Indian food here before", I said.  "It is not the same here as in India", he replied, and then he began to snicker.

That was worrisome.

What I found was that the food in Hyderabad is really good; and yes, it is spicy.  There is a wide variety of cultural influences there (East and West, North Indian and Southern Indian, Hindu and Muslim) that combine in some crazy and exhilarating ways in the resulting local cuisine.

I was told that the state of Andhra Pradesh (the state Hyderabad is located in) is known for having some of the spiciest food in India (this is, of course, hotly debated by people from certain other regions).  It was also very spicy, but not necessarily in the way I expected.  I thought that I would be eating a lot of dishes with tremendous spicy heat, but the dishes are spicy not in the sense that always burns out your mouth (although there are some dishes that do this), but in the sense that the flavors are all strong.  So the hot dishes are hot, and sour dishes are sour, and the sweet desserts are really sweet.  The bottom line is that if you travel here, and you can't handle spicy foods, you are going to have some difficulty surviving.  For those types of people, there is really only the starches.  Luckily, there are a large variety of delicious Indian breads and rice available: Northern naan and roti, fried puri, crispy and spicy papad, and the crepe-like Southern specialty, the dosa.  The spiciness of the main dish is normally allayed by the concurrent consumption of bread or rice (with rice actually being the more traditional accompaniment).  One of my co-workers who traveled with me from the States attempted to follow a no-carb diet he was on.  That turned out to be not such a good idea.  Both the meat and vegetables were heavily spiced, and he filled up on that, and didn't eat any of the bread or curd that would have alleviated the spice.  Indigestion ensued.

In Southern Indian areas like Andhras, it is common to eat with one's hands, i.e. no utensils.  This can be a bit unsettling to see at first, primarily because a) it involves eating types of food (for example curry and rice) that you would never imagine eating with your hands, and b) when people do it, they really handle and touch the food a lot before putting it in their mouths.  Eventually I got used to seeing it, but I didn't try it myself.  At the end of the meal, you will typically get brought to you a dish with warm water with soap or lemon in it to wash your hands with.

The dish that Hyderabad is famous for is the biryani,  The dish is really good, and evidently is hard to find a good example of in the States.  Biryani  is a steamed rice dish cooked with chicken or lamb and spices.
There is a stereotype that all Indians are vegetarian, but while vegetarian practice is common, meat consumption is also common in Hyderabad.  There is a large, mostly non-veg Muslim population in Hyderabad, and the younger generation in general seems to have less aversion to meat eating.  The common meats are chicken and lamb.  Amusingly, when I was dying for a Western hamburger, I managed to find one at the local Chili's.  The burger was made of buffalo, of course.  It turns out that at least one preconception I had  (no beef eating in India) was pretty accurate.

The culmination of my culinary experience came, naturally enough, at McDonald's.  I ordered the McSpicy Paneer sandwich.  It was vegetarian, spicy, and yet still familiar with that oh-so-soft bun and crispy and greasy Chicken McNugget-style fried batter.  I was able to experience the clash of East and West in one spectacularly unhealthy bite.

All in all, I had a great culinary experience in India.  There was a surprising amount of Western influence, but ultimately the food was probably the most different from California cuisine that I've had in my travels so far.

Travel Notes:

-- If you are writing about the tech industry in India, one thing to note is that it is a lot more formal than it is in the States, especially when compared to the West Coast.  By formal, I don't mean attire, but rather the adherence to hierarchy and the interaction between employees and their managers.  In my case, I would walk into the cube area where my team was located at the Hyderabad office, and they would all stand to attention immediately, and would not sit until I left the area.  This never happens to me when I visit my team at my home office (I'm lucky if they even notice I'm there, ha ha).

-- When you write about India, take care to pay attention about what region you are writing about.  There are large language, religious, and culture differences depending on the area of India you are focusing on.  There is a general division made between the culture of Northern and Southern India, and that difference is often even further sub-divided based on region and religion. 

-- One interesting quirk about fitness and exercise: like in the U.S., there is a growing interest in health and fitness.  However, one thing that is not common or popular is running in the streets.  For one thing, it is not safe; you are likely to get killed due to the crazy traffic (see my previous post).  The other thing is, as my friend laughingly put it, "If you run in the street in India, you will be arrested, because the police will assume you stole something!"

    

The Hyderabad Washroom (observations from India)

On my first business trip to Hyderabad, India, I was visiting one of the local museums with my coworkers and I needed to use the washroom.  I did so with some trepidation; I've visited my share of public washrooms in Asia, and seen quite a few sketchy ones.  Besides a slightly bad smell (I've been in worse here in the States),  I saw a row of brand new urinals, which was a relief.  I began doing what you do at a urinal, but during the act I happened to look down and was shocked to notice a golden flow running down an open trench directly below the urinal in the floor.  Upon closer inspection, the urinal was not hooked directly into the sewage system, but instead had a hole in the bottom directly above the trench!  Ugh.

That washroom is in a sense a microcosm of what is happening in Hyderabad.  The city is modernizing at a rapid pace, but the development is not even.  Hyderabad has become a hot location for high tech companies looking for cheaper alternatives to hire highly skilled employees.  This has, in recent years, moved beyond basic outsourcing (i.e., hiring the services of an independent company located in India and subcontracting the work) to companies like mine opening full-fledged R&D divisions.  The city itself is rapidly modernizing and expanding due to the influx of capital and flood of people moving there to fill the growing job market.

The city of Hyderabad is stratified.  There are two main areas I visited: HITEC City, the newly developed IT area where my company's R&D division is located, and the Old City, where many of the tourist sites are located.  The differences between the two areas in terms of look and feel are stark.   In HITEC City, there are many areas where you could reasonably fool yourself into thinking that you were somewhere on the West Coast; there are strip malls, fancy hotels and office buildings, and plenty of expensive cars being driven around.  One thing that I found a little different was the lack of uniformity of the streets, signs, and sidewalks.  A U.S. city normally has a uniform feel in terms of the look and maintenance of its streets, but in Hyderabad, I would see pretty decent upkeep in HITEC City, but the color and consistency of the sidewalks would seem to change from block to block, as if each of the individual building owners were responsible for the roads and walkways surrounding their land.

The Old City is -- to put it bluntly -- old, and seems to fall below the standard level of city maintenance that an American would be used to.  There are a fair number of elaborate and  beautiful monuments and buildings interspersed throughout the Old City, however; due to the strong Muslim influence on design, this area of town has a very interesting feel to it.

Cell phone usage is common, although widespread use of data streaming capabilities is just coming online (3G is widely available but higher speeds are not).  Network accessibility in hotels are also widely available but speed and reliability are not quite as good as you find in the U.S.  Both the old and new parts of the city are affected by daily power outages, which typically will only last for between 10 and 30 seconds.

One of the most immediate and visceral differences between India and the U.S. is the traffic.  If you want to get an idea of what this is, search for 'Hyderbad Traffic' on YouTube.  Basically, you can imagine an intersection with cars, motorbikes, and pedestrians moving full speed in every direction at once, somehow impossibly managing to avoid collisions.  It is madness.  Even watching the video can't prepare you for the experience of actually travelling in that traffic.  A few hints: don't sit in the front seat of a car, don't bother accepting that bike ride from your Hyderbadi friend, and definitely don't try crossing the street on your own!   Cars are becoming more and more popular, and it is becoming quite common to see some quite expensive cars driving on the streets.  The motor bike is has been the preferred method of travel because you can weave in and out of traffic much more easily than you could in a car.  However, the car has a higher prestige level, which is becoming more of a factor in peoples' choice of transportation as the ranks of the middle class increases.  This has the effect of creating three tiers of simultaneous traffic speed (including the pedestrians), seemingly increasing the chaos level.  Taxis in Hyderabad are essentially passenger cabins built on top of motorbikes.  It all seems to work, however; I saw more accidents during the two hours driving from San Diego to LAX than I saw during my entire two week trip in Hyderabad!  

Although I was initially shocked by my experience in the Hyderabad washroom, in the end I decided that the experience was actually much better than many other questionable washrooms I've visited in Asia.  It was not quite what I was expecting, but like Hyderabad itself, was definitely interesting!

A few random India travel notes:

The first thing to realize when writing about a trip to India, is that it is far.  The time zone difference from Pacific Standard Time is twelve and a half hours; traveling to India from Los Angeles is about the farthest place you can go on the planet.  This means that if you are writing about a fictional character visiting India, your character will have to travel between twenty to twenty-eight hours by plane, and possibly more if he or she has to go to an outlying region by car or train from the metropolitan center.  So having your character do anything significant immediately after arriving in India is not really plausible due to the travel fatigue he or she will be experiencing.

Although India is large enough to contain multiple time zones, the government there decided to have a unified time zone for the entire country (India Standard Time or IST).  In order to accommodate this, and not have either of the two halves of the country have days that end too early or too late, they elected to have a time zone that falls between the official two hourly GMT offsets; hence the aforementioned twelve and a half hour difference.  This is unusual (but not unique to India) as most countries are offset at hourly increments from GMT.  Also, India does not observe Daylight Savings Time.  

Language is not an issue for a native English speaker visiting any of the major metropolitan areas in India.  Although Hindi is the official national language, in southern regions such as Hyderabad, it is not normally used (Telugu is the common spoken language).  Typically, when a Northern Indian and a Southern Indian communicate with each other, they will use the other national language, English.  

In my next blog, I'll be writing about two of my favorite aspects of Hyderabad: the food, and the people.