“Are you a player?” asked the custom official. “Sure.”, I replied. “Ok, this way, please, Sir.” Thanks to the Asian-African games being held in Hyderabad and not looking Indian at all, I was able to pass customs in a second … The luggage took an eternity to arrive. In the entrance area and outside the airport, hundreds of locals are waiting, waving flowers and hands to welcome their relatives or friends. “Mr. Gawson?” — no, I’m defnitely not the one, the bold gentleman asking the queston, is looking for. Like him, another ten dozen Indians wait ouside. Desperately shouting and helding signs with the names of foreigners they are here to pick up. Finally, I see two young men with a board that has “Color Chips” and my name printed on it.
As we wait, I’m photographed by a guy who, too, obviousy has mistaken me for a player attending the games. Another ten minutes later the Ambassador car arrives and off we are into the hell that is Indian traffic.
Lanes are for loosers, the three wheeled cabs with their imbécile variety of klaxon sounds flood between the busses, Ambassadors and sporadic newer vehicles like mad bugs. The late october rain is evaporated by over 20°C and ensures that the cars’ exhausts stay in the streets, making breathing taste like you’re a suicidal, who locked himself in his garage. Over the worn facades of instanced concrete clumpsyness, that means home to most of this city’s people, the stridently colored billboards of western hemisphere influenced advertising, absorbing the Indian multi-ethnic society’s roots in every second that flushes down the veins of this organism, like blood drops into a sluice.
“Hyderabad is crazy, but Mumbai is ten to fifteen times as crazy.”, says a 24 years young 2D supervisor Sri Vadsav of Color Chips. We end our shopping expedition with some overly expensive beers in a Pub called “Easy Rider”, obviously frequented by people of a rather superficious provenience.
A pair of handmade leather shoes, copied from those I wear and which I bought in Milan this spring, will cost me 1,000 Rupiees — ;about 20
