The Sambhar Rice and the Coconut chutney

Well, so I am in South India. Not the first time, but definitely the first time for more than a week and with another year and a half lined up. So this is it, Welcome to Hyderabad!

With my Bengali lineage and Maharashtrian upbringing, I have eaten quite an assortment of food. So much variety that a restaurant menu would not suffice; But since the last 10 days, I have had almost all meals of Sambhar-rice! Bland food, so bland that I carry chaat masala with me to eat; And oh no no, this is not the worst part, these local girls went and complained that the food is ‘spicy’ and what I expect next is boiled vegetables!!

Food the way I’ve never had before
Vegetables that I don’t identify
Tamarind in everything
Cutlery = absent
Rice rice everywhere
Water straight from the oceans
No ‘daal’ in the daal
No tea, they serve morning sugar syrup
LONG queue for bath and longer for breakfast
Cycling across the 2300 acres called ‘campus’
No cellular network in the jungles

I asked for college life, not Jail life!


Ahem. So well, you get the hang of it, don’t you?

The TV channel doesn’t change. If you want to change, you use your stick / pen / clip, because there is no knob you see.. So it plays telegu stuff and I don’t even cross that corridor.

My room-mate’s possibly the best I could ever have! She is from Pune, so it’s like having someone from back-home live with me :-) Plus we like a lot of common things and don’t like a lot of other common things; in short, great! *thumbs up*
Very few guys from Mumbai; I made some decent amount of friends and we set off exploring the university every now and then :-) So, life doesn’t actually suck :P

Hyderabad is a funny place. They have cheesy parts of the city called Cyberabad, Telecom-nagar, hi-tech city n all; which by my view is funny :D The language is funny too. I’m not talking about telegu, any south Indian language is the same for me; here, I talk about the hyderabadi hindi :-| Oh, you’ve gotta hear it to know what I’m talking about.

I came alone to the city :-) I mostly travel alone and well, I kinda settled by myself too; so that’s prolly good.. The cycling is settled, even the room with my personal touches :-)

This is different from the place I grew up in
Very different
Maybe that means that life has a lot in store for me here
I don’t know, time will tell..

My Profs have a very sexy profile though. They are all visiting faculty in BIG schools like IISc, BARC, TIFR, MIT, some German and UK schools.. Even seniors have a great set up, so well, I have that much pressure on me to perform well..

I will write often now. I can’t believe that I didn’t write on my birthday. I had a nice one, but it was kinda sad coz I left for Hyd the next day. It is ok, the month-long birthday celebrations had gotta stop someday.. So, 20th year of life it is :-)


Oh, about the coconut chutney..

I dunno why but these south Indians love that one man!
It is served with everything! Idli, rice, puri, pakoda, samosa, upma, OKAY!
But they served it with aloo ka paratha! Beat that now..
Goodbye to good food..
*sigh*