Cyberabad

The dhoti post below was written on Monday night, the 18th of July, but I just got it posted. We arrived in Hyderabad yesterday night after a long day of travel and the first thing that hit us when we stepped off the Kingfisher Airlines turbo-prop and onto the tarmac was a cool breeze. Oh, yeah. Inside the terminal, things were bright and clean and smelled like disinfectant. There was a two-story wall of green plants and a flat-screen video monitor showing the bags coming up onto the carousel. Weary and cranky travelers started to feel more optimistic. Outside the airport, we rolled our bags down a smooth series of ramps past brightly lit stores and fast-food resurants and onto an unbroken sidewalk that parelleled the entrance road. A fountain gushed across the way and I read two clearly marked signs I had never seen in India before, "Do not spit," read one, and the other commanded, "Do not litter." And it looked like either the command had been followed, or someone had been cleaning up.

The big, brand new bus that picked us up pulled out onto a wide, uncrowded highway and headed down the road, apparently keeping to its own lane and not honking. After a few miles, Ricky turned around and asked, "Do you know where we are, because we're not in India." And the place we found ourselves in did not seem like the India we have gotten used to. There we surprisingly few people sleeping under the overpass, trash had not grown to vast piles, and gleaming modern buildings rose up all around. At the Best Western in Jubilee Hills, we checked in and dined on a lavish buffet while the Discovery channel played on a flatsceen and orchestral versions of 80's top 40 hits played. Looking out the window of our room, it hit me. We weren't in the ancient and storied city of Hyderabad. We were in Cyberabad, the brash and new-moneyed suburbs where the IT sector is booming and foreign business executives wine and dine.

Of course, our study of the Millennium Development Goals has no use for Cyberabad except to give weary Americans a little comfort. Today we headed out visit our daily NGO's. The work that Akshaya Patra (getting its own blog entry in the near future) does takes place in the government schools where the student population is high poverty and there are problems with dropouts and truancy. We visited a school where the organization is providing lunches for school chindren attending class in bare concrete rooms and lunching in an open center field where boars rooted around for the leftovers. On the way to our afternoon session we passed a dead dog so stiff his legs really were sticking straight out into the air and flies formed a thick blanket over him. Just a few yards further down the street, the Andra Pradesh state police loitered in front of a gate in full riot gear. It's getting a little tired to say India is a land of contradictions but, well . . . it is.

Even Cyberabad has its issues and absurdities, but they are different. I have to take my laptop down to the front desk once a day to have the concierge help me log in for my 24 hours of free wifi because you have to have a mobile phone to activate your pin number and I didn't bring mine. And I could not call my bank using the toll free international number on the back of my card because the entire hotel is VOIP. In Cyberabad, I'm the less developed one.