Hyderabad Rocks
Khajaguda
I am pausing stories from Mumbai to show you something I love - a few rocks from the twin city of Hyderabad and Secundrabad. The twin city charms you first with its famous four Minars and their Biryani, and as every visitor and local will remind you, like all great cities, the place has more to it than these popular things.
Have you noticed that very few people call it Twin City anymore? That’s because the city has merged into one and then split into multiple cities within one, like many other cities in India. The Cantonment and City of Bangalore or Camp and Deccan of Pune.
Rocks of Khajaguda
Khajaguda’s rocks are very popular with the locals of Hyderabad. It seems to be even for my friend and one of India’s best photojournalists - Sriharsha Vadlamani, or Harsha as he is known. He loves to hate Hyderabad and dismisses his current home as a place with nothing to photograph. For the two days, I spent with him loafing around the city, I rarely saw him capture images with the high-end professional camera he uses or his mobile phone. I felt like a child or a monkey with a new toy, pointing and shooting everything that caught or didn’t catch my eye. He also had tens of places he wanted to show me in the city that, according to him, could have been more worthy. I decided to ignore the indifference in his words and follow him wherever he took me.
He arrived 15 minutes before 6 am when we had decided to meet, and we went to Khajaguda to see the city as the sun rose.
What strikes a visitor is the sprawl of the city of Hyderabad
An ocean of concrete, steel and glass is connected by highways often clogged with traffic. The new skyline, however, hasn’t completely obliterated the one from the past that was headlined by the rocks, and at Khajaguda, we were on the top of one. Once outside the city, this place is far from its edges today. The lakes that controlled the floods and water supply to the city look like small stagnant about to be gobbled up by neat rows of fancy villas.
The city seems to treat the rocks like we in Mumbai and around the world treat the ocean. It is seemingly useless but with unlimited resources for those who know to exploit it to feed us and, in the case of Hyderabad, provide homes for shelter and work.
Water on the Rocks
We are Fish in a Sea of Concrete
The protected rocks of Khajaguda itself seem to be divided among different groups - a dargah, a small shrine and a place where a godman once mediated. The paints of the rocks mark their territory. Dogs, insects and animals sniff around them, making their markings.
Links:
Check out Harsha’s work
Serish of The Hindu is a good person to follow on Twitter for for a daily dose of Hyderabad
City Ordinary loves buses and gives a unique view of the city from his daily commute
Yunus Lasania is unsaid stories about Hyderabad