Hyderabad September 24-26

After spending five days in Delhi, I flew to Hyderabad into the spectacular new airport that opened in March. I spent the bulk of two days at the Henry Martyn Institute (HMI), where I had taught in the Islamic studies programs between 2000 and 2006. This was my third short trip back since I left in mid-2006. The current director is retiring in December, so there was a lot of news about the transition to get caught up on.

The HMI campus

I had dinner one evening with Christy Femila, one of my former students, who last spring finished the Masters of Theology program that HMI offers with Luther Seminary in St Paul, Minnesota. She has now joined the HMI academic staff.

Christy Femila

I had dinner a second evening with Shashi Singha, the HMI administrator, and I also spent a good deal of time chatting with Vijay Sastry, another of my former students and a HMI-Luther MTh student, who is also now on the HMI academic staff.

Vijay Sastry at my former desk

I have been impressed by how rapidly Hyderabad has been developing economically. New shopping malls are sprouting up like mushrooms, as I also observed in Delhi. One other sign of Hyderabad becoming an international city is the decision by the US State Department to open a consulate here. When it opens in a couple of months, it will be only the second consulate in the city; Iran has had a small consulate for some years due to the large 12er Shi‘ite community in Hyderabad. I had dinner my third evening with the US foreign service officer who is in charge of getting the consulate up and running; he is an interesting character who had a previous career as a singer on Broadway.

Hyderabad has suffered from some bombing incidents recently, so security is everpresent at every mall entrance; in the underground parking garage at one mall, every car gets searched. That is a level of security I once found only in Israel; Jordan also has a lot of security guards with metal dectors now at hotel and shop entrances.

I stayed my three nights in Hyderabad with Timothy Marthand, a 33-year old native Hyderabadi who is a world-class concert pianist. He has the Steinway concert grand that Arthur Rubinstein used to play in his living room.

I bought from Timothy his slightly-used iPhone. I am not sure that I really need a US $500 cell phone, but it is a neat toy to have. Timothy also passed on to me some more music for my iPod, including one piece that I was not familiar with: Boccherini’s Fandango Quintetto. The version by Andreas Staier for two harpsichords and castanettes is spectacular. (The recording is posted on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhzR_MYcjiU, although the sound quality leaves much to be desired).

One reason for my trip to Hyderabad was to finally take care of some stuff that I have had in storage with Vijay for the past two years. I took a lot of stuff back with me to Jordan, but I got caught for excess baggage. I arrived at the airport with luggage that weighed 43 kilos (the limit is 20 kilos) and a carry-on backpack that weighed 14 kilos (the limit is 6 kilos). I spent an hour at the counter discarding about 15 kilos of stuff, but still got hit with a US $220 charge for the remaining excess weight.