Trip to India - Jan 30th to Feb 5th, 2006

I'm typing this from 6 miles above the Arctic Ocean, just south of Spitzbergen on the way back from a business trip to Hyderabad. The 16-hour leg from Delhi to Chicago has left me plenty of time to play with the photos I took during the week and here are a few of my favourites. Click on any thumbnail for a larger version and more explanation.

Conexant's design center in Hyderabad is in an area known as HiTech City (or Cyberabad) which is undergoing explosive growth as more tech companies take advantage of the pool of educated personnel in this area. The office facilities are very pleasant indeed and the architecture makes for some interesting abstract images.

Although many large office complexes (such as the building above occupied by Conexant and Deloitte among others or Cyber Towers to the left which houses such companies as Microsoft as far as I can gather) have been completed in the last two or three years, major construction is still ongoing to build at least as many again.

Views of the construction site proved surprising to me for several reasons. Firstly, the workers live in temporary shacks on a shanty town within the site itself. The contrast of this obvious poverty with the affluence demonstrated by the offices and the people occupying them was extremely striking. From what I can see, throughout India, extreme poverty and extreme wealth exist side-by-side - million dollar homes sit next to cardboard and tarpaulin huts in many areas of Hyderabad that we drove through.

The second surprise was the number of women doing manual labour jobs such as rock breaking on the site. Whereas these jobs would be done using power tools and a small workforce in Europe or the USA, here, manual tools and a large workforce performed the work (aside from cases where a couple of excavators were used). In a country where the labour pool is enormous and very cheap, I suppose the economics make it more sensible to use lots of people rather than a machine to perform these tasks. Looking at the site, I kept remembering one of the opening scenes from the film Powaqqatsi which shows hundreds of people working in a gemstone mine.

After our work for the week was completed, we spent Saturday morning visiting a couple of attractions in the city. The first was Charminar - a large monument containing a viewing gallery and small mosque which sits at the focal point in the old town of Hyderabad about 30 minutes south of where we were staying in the new city. This area of narrow streets, jewelry vendors and open-air markets was interesting but, like Agra later, I definitely did not feel particularly welcome. I get the distinct impression that the people there see tourists purely as sources of money (the more the better). A complete lack of courtesy and greetings based on scowls rather than a smile were the norm unfortunately, as were extremely pushy street vendors who follow you around mercilessly selling pearl neckklaces and bangles of somewhat dubious quality.

In short, if you are in Hyderabad, go and see Charminar and the old town but don't expect a particularly warm welcome and certainly be prepared to be mobbed by street vendors and others seeking to cash in on your position as a gullible tourist.

I should point out that the (lack of) welcome of the vendors and service providers in the tourist areas we visited was definitely not mirrored by the people we were working with while in India, all of whom could not have done more to make us welcome and show us around the city. I would have absolutely no qualms about returning to Hyderabad on business but will not likely be taking my family to India for a holiday any time soon.

Next to Charminar, is the central mosque of Hyderabad which can accomodate 10000 worshipers for 5-times daily prayers (6 on Friday). Only men are allowed inside the mosque itself but I got the distinct feeling that the only reason for being invited in was to solicit funds for the mosque's attached orphanage.

After our morning in Hyderabad, we flew to Delhi meeting up with another 3 colleagues who had been elsewhere in India and a couple of cars which were to take us to Agra for a day of sightseeing at the Taj Mahal. This was to be the highlight of the week and I had brought my DSLR and all my equipment other than the tripod for a day of photography at one of the world's most photographed sites. In a hugely annoying twist of fate, however, I managed to drop my camera after falling down a hole while photographing a building on the way out of Delhi and, as a result, had to fall back on my point-and-shoot Coolpix 4600 instead. This camera did me very well in Guatemala but I really missed the speed and flexibility of the DSLR and lenses. Anyway, here are a few of the shots I took yesterday (which, I should point out, I'm pretty happy with despite the fact that I didn't get to play with my main camera).