Hyderabad November 6-8

My flight arrived in Hyderabad at 7:45 am on Wednesday November 6, and I went into the Abids area in the city center and checked into the Sai Prakash hotel, where I have stayed a number of times before.

Later that morning I went to the nearby Andhra Pradesh State Department of Archaeology to make a courtesy call on the chief archaeologists there and talk about my project in Bhimunipatnam and the Visakhapatnam District. Meeting them was the one crucial thing I needed to do in Hyderabad.

I showed them a copy of the draft reports of my 2011 and 2013 projects and they immediately noticed that I had made a major mistake by identifying my project as a Survey of Heritage Buildings in Bhimunipatnam. That needed to be “documentation” not ‘survey” because that is what my permit from the Andhra Pradesh State Department of Archaeology stated. It seems that there is a crucial distinction between “documentation” projects, which the state departments of archaeology can issue permits for and “survey” projects, which only the central government Archaeological Survey of India can issue permits for.

Later that afternoon I went to Shivarampally in the far south side of the city to meet Shobha, a friend and former colleague at the Henry Martyn Institute, only to have another comical episode of missing each other. When I arrived at her flat at the arranged time she happened to be chatting with a neighbor one floor down and with dysfunctional cell phones, it took us an hour and a half to get together. This episode again highlights the perils of my trying to meet people within hours of my arrival in India, before I have settled in and have a functioning cell phone.

In any event, the rest of the evening passed pleasantly. I left at 10:00, by which time buses have stopped running so it took about an hour and a half to get back to my hotel via seven-seater auto and walking.

The next day, Thursday November 7, in the morning I had a long session at an internet outlet and did some shopping. Later that afternoon, I went once again to Shivarampally to meet Varghese, another friend, former student and colleague at the Henry Martyn Institute, and attend a small function for the second anniversary of his founding his Daya Center for Peace. I then stayed on for dinner with Varghese, his wife Reeba and some others from the Center.

 

Varghese speaking about the Daya Center for Peace at the function

The third day, Friday November 8, I went once again to Shivarampally in the morning to visit the people at the Henry Martyn Institute, where I had taught between 2000 and 2006. Given that on each of the three days I was in Hyderabad I ended up traveling the long distance from the city center to Shivarampally in the far south side of the city, I would have been better off arranging to stay in the Henry Martyn Institute hostel.

 

The campus of the Henry Martyn Institute

In the afternoon I returned to the city center and did some shopping and got things arranged for my early morning flight to Ahmedabad. In recent days I had been reading Nirad Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.