Ringing in 2006 Hyderabadi style

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Happy 2006!

I spent the last day of 2005 doing not too much. My hosts had several errands to run in the morning, and I was happy to have some time to do some reading. For lunch, we went to the Grand Kakatiya hotel, a 5-star hotel which seems to cater to western visitors. It is all marble and chandeliers inside, and it has several great restuarants. We went to the "Deccan Pavilion", which serves a buffet of foods from the part of India around Hyderabad (known as "The Deccan"). The food was a delicious mixture of lentils, yoghurt, spices, and vegetables I've never heard of before. I wrapped up my meal with my favorite Indian dessert, gulab jamun, which is basically a fried ball of donut dough soaked in sugar syrup. Mmmmmm.

After lunch, I went with Priya and her mom to a linens store to buy some things, towels and a saree for them, and a kurta pajama for me. A kurta is a long loose shirt with flowing tails, and a pajama is a loose-fitting pair of pants that tapers to the ankles. Taken together, they make what we call pajamas in the US. Here, though, they're not just worn for sleeping but also as casual clothes. Devout muslim men here in hyderabad where something that looks like a kurta pajama all the time, but it might be a Salwar Khameez that they're wearing - the only difference I see between a kurta pajama and a salwar khameez is that the salwar khameez has much tighter fitting pants.

Shopping at these nice stores is different than shopping i've done in the US. Here, you walk in and tell an attendant what you're there for. He seats you at a counter with comfortable chairs and another attendant starts bringing out examples of what you're looking for and presenting them to you. While looking at kurta pajama, this guy must've brought out 20 of them and happily presented them to me. I finally found one I liked and he sent it down to the register for me to pick up later. The same ritual proceeded at the saree counter and even at the towel counter.

After making our purchases, we headed home to rest up for the big New Year's Eve event later in the night. I didn't know what to expect from this event. Most of Priya's friends insisted it would be great fun, but one guy said "oh, they tried to do that last year and it was a bust". I understood it would be a big party of some kind, but that was about all I knew. As the evening progressed, Priya got various phone calls from her friends telling her first that the event had sold out (fortunately we bought advance tickets), and then that we had to head out much earlier than we had planned (8:30 instead of 10pm). I took a short nap, and scarfed some spicy rice-pickle-yoghurt dinner, and we headed to meet with Priya's friends and go to the party.

We loaded into cars and made what seemed like a long drive out to the high-tech area of Hyderabad, where the city is encouraging investment by international high-tech companies. There are slick shiny buildings behind high fences that look nothing like anything else in Hyderabad. As we drove into the hi-tech area, we saw hordes of people. All of us had in the car simultaneously realized that this was a very big event. We managed to park (this was the reason we had to head there so early) and made our way to the entrance. We could hear and see the party from a long way away. There was a massive dance floor and sound system set up in the center of a group of buildings called charmingling "Hitex", a newly constructed convention center for international high-tech stuff. Out front was a sculpture of two enormous elephant tusks (about 40 feet tall) which one of my Indian companions called "thorns". We proceeded in past bored looking guards and Hyderabadi police armed with what looked like single-shot hunting rifles. India is a little on edge right now because an IIT professor was recently assinated in Bangalore, and this sort of gun violence is evidently rare here. Once inside, I saw that this was a massive party of the type we used to call "raves" in the US. Of course, these don't happen in the US anymore because drug use became rampant at them. Here, as far as I can tell, hard drug use is not much of a problem. I don't know exactly why that is - possibly it is because India still has a stricter family structure intact than the US, or maybe there is just not enough money. I think that as India becomes more westernized and liberalized, drugs will probably become an issue, but it is nice that that stuff hasn't screwed things up here yet.

The dance floor, lights, and decorations were beautiful (thousands of cd's strung from a net over the dance floor, reflecting light everywhere. When I saw that many spare CD's, i though "AOL is in India too?"). We went right to dancing. Club music here is simultaneously familiar and foreign. Most tracks are a song I might know from the US, but remixed to include Indian instruments. One distinct example I remember was 50-cent's "In Da Club" which was remixed to have tabla (Indian hand drums) and flute. It sounded great! Also, people here are very into dancing to bhangra, which is a style of drum-heavy music from Punjab. From what I hear, bhangra is very popular in the UK right now, but you still don't hear much of it in the US. That might change though, because this stuff is really fun to dance to.

Except for the bhangra, and the ubiquitous tabla and flute, this could have easily been a party in the US. Well, except for the concession stand. The disorganization there reminded me of what i see everyday riding in traffic. We gradually figured out that you had to buy tickets in one place (an unlighted window in a cardboard construction) to get drinks, and but another kind of ticket in another place to buy food. The purchasing lines were a free-for-all. I'm kind of used to it now, but this sort of disorganization you normally don't see in the US. Things seem to work just fine here, though.

At some point in the night, I found out that there were 16,000 people at this event. That is a lot of people. And, unlike anything that happens in the US, the crowd was almost completely homogenous. For a while I thought I might be the online non-Indian among 15999 Indians. But I did see 2 others.... so there were three non-Indians among 15997 Indians.


While weaving through the crowd to buy drinks, I had a sort of revelation about how traffic works here. At halftime at a football game in the US, everyone heads for the bathrooms or the concession stands. There are no lanes, or steadfast rules regarding how to maneuver through the crowd, but by being either too pushy or not pushy enough, you won't get anywhere. Once everyone finds the right level of assertiveness, things flow, people make it to the stands or the toilets, and what looks like chaos to someone 100 feet away actually works for everyone involved. That's basically what the roads are like here. Obviously hitting someone will slow you down, so you don't want to do that, and if you're too polite, everyone will take advantage of you. So, you find the right level of assertiveness, and everything works. It still looks like chaos to me a lot of the time, but I've ridden in it enough to see that it actually does work.

I had a blast at the New Year's party. Dancing outside here in the middle of the subcontinent with a few thousand people having a great time was a good way to ring in 2006. About 1, we all got kind of tired, and we headed home to beat the rush that would surely cause a massive traffic jam.

I slept well and got up late. Priya and her parents were going to a Hindu naming ceremony for a baby born recently to a relative. We showed up a bit late, but I think I got the gist of the ceremony. Somewhere, there was a small ceremony going on, but mostly, everyone was eating, chatting, and having a nice time. I'm told that for most people here, the formalities of the ceremony just provide an excuse to get together, eat well and have a good time. Evidently this goes for weddings too. Weddings are of course very formal and structured in the US, but here, even during the exchange of vows, most guests are eating and chatting.

After the ceremony, we headed home to pack and rest up for our trip to Goa tomorrow.

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