Life Etc Etc

Some roads you choose and some roads choose you. On a rainy Saturday afternoon the road led me to Salar Jung museum , the crown jewel of Hyderabad's vintage glory. The monument (Credits: Wikipedia) I had visited Salar Jung musuem before but I couldn't pass up on the chance to revel in history and marvel at the collection of one Mir Yousuf Ali Khan, Salar Jung III . The Man As soon as I entered the main block (the museum has 3 separate blocks) a sense of familiarity guided me through the maze of rooms and I was immediately lost in the lap of history. The only thing missing was a Salar Jung museum app(most museums in the west already have apps) which I could have easily downloaded from the Play Store . The app in turn would have laid out the map of the museum before me, guided me through various rooms and would have also given me an audio commentary for some important exhibits. The technology constraint notwithstanding I spent more than half a day at the museum an...

More than two decades ago a 5 year old boy (yours truly) found himself in Abids which was certainly then the microcosm of Hyderabad. Abids in the 80s <Courtesy: OkaTeluguAbbayi > The occasion was a family outing to Zamarrud Cinema. And we are stepping out for not just any movie my friends, my parents decided that nothing less than the Raj Kapoor blockbuster Chori Chori was good enough for us. To be honest I wasn't exactly enthused about watching a black and white film of a bygone era even though the movie had all the credentials of a classic. But that was before I saw Zamarrud, the theatre where the movie was being played. Nested in the heart of Abids, Zamarrud was the perfect amalgamation of Hyderabad's old world charm and new fangled ways. Zamarrud was not just any theatre, it was one of the first air conditioned halls in Hyderabad, a premiere cinema hall which used to host the best of what the film industry had to offer and the place to go for Hyderabad...