Wednesday Dinner with the Team

Big thanks to Surekha and Kunal for hosting us all at their house on Wednesday night.  It was super cool to see their home and get an idea for how people live in Hyderabad.

There was a little sadness this night too as it was the last evening for Sivaram being part of our team.  He's off to work at what we now refer to as the "Fruit Company".  I leave it to you to figure out what that means.

(Sivaram, Shashi, Radhika, me, Prajakta, and Surekha)

Surekha and Kunal were nice enough to tour us around their community.  Pretty nice setup when you consider that they've got a pool, gym, grocery, medical clinic, playgrounds, etc. at their community. 

And then the serious business started.  A good old game of Carrom.  If you know Crokinole, you kinda of know this game.  Carrom has a few different rules and tactics, but with the same technique.

Surekha's son Sthitapragnya was nice enough to let us play with him on his board.  Despite a fast start, I quickly faded:

Falaknama Palace

Thursday night some of the folks in the team took me for a tour and dinner at Falaknama Palace.  Falaknama is one of the most amazing historic things I've seen.  To set the stage a bit, this palace was completed in 1893 by the Prime Minister of Hyderabad, who was the brother-in-law of the 6th Nizam King.  When the palace was completed and the Prime Minister was broke, he asked his brother-in-law for a favor, namely buying the palace from him for 2,000,000 rupees.  Think about the kind of money involved here when that's 1897 money.  In 2019, 2M rupees is worth around $28k USD.  If you take inflation in to account, that's around $61,000,000 US dollars.

According to our guide, with the great number of palaces the king already had, he wasn't too interested in buying a new palace, but he nevertheless helped out his brother-in-law, primarily using the palace to house visiting royal guests and his army of concubines - once apparently numbering around 1000 with him having close to 2000 kids.

I've been to a couple other Nizam palaces, like Chowmahalla Palace, back in 2012, which was also very impressive, but Chowmahalla has a very different vibe than Falaknama.  A few things that stand out about Falaknama:

1. Location / View:

You have to understand that Hitech City, the area that Qualcomm is in, is a brand new high tech park.  15 years ago it was all farmland.  Now it's wide, generally straight streets; metro lines; tall buildings; and fast paced life.  Falaknama is in the old part of Hyderabad.  An area where a lot of Muslims live.  Streets go in circles, many are tight little alleyways.  When you go to this area, you see people who are pretty much living the same way their ancestors did 100s of years ago.

For us, that meant that the drive to the palace was a wild one.  No one knew exactly how to get there. One of us had Google maps going, the other had Apple.  Each gave it's own ideas on the right way to get there.  Some of them turned out to be entirely wrong, such as this street we were routed to:

Falaknama is on a hill overlooking the old city.  The view below is the opposite angle from the photo above.  It was taken from the top story of the palace, looking down on the old city.

Seeing this view, you can start to imagine how if you were the Nizam king, you could stand on the balcony looking through your binoculars and watch what was happening with your people.  The Nizams were well known for their building projects for the city of Hyderabad.  Things like medical schools, court buildings, hospitals, universities, etc.  So, the king could literally stand here and watch his world growing up around him.

2. Guests:

The king hosted many foreign monarchs at Falaknama, including King George V, King Edward VIII (his son), and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.  Of late, Shweta and I have become a little fascinated with reading about Queen Victoria, her grandchildren like George, Nicholas, and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.  The disaster that these cousins managed to create with their handling of the diplomacy leading up to World War 1 is a sad, sometimes shocking debacle.  If you're interested in some reading on the subject, Ken Follett's Fall of Giants, while long is very good.

So, to walk in to the front entrance of the palace and see giant paintings of some of these guests is very cool.  To think that they were there, walking the same halls brings something romantic to the experience.

3. Layout:

Like Chowmahalla, Falaknama isn't more than it needs to be.  The main palace building has a 100 person dining hall, with one large table.  There's a small ballroom adjacent to the dining hall.  It's got a men's lounge equipped with the original 12.5 foot billiards table, chess boards, playing card tables and a bar.  The ladies can congregate in the ladies gossip room.  There's a very large drawing room where you can relax and read a book.  Finally, there are some bed rooms for VIP guests and the king's family.  Guest rooms then spread out around the inner courtyard.  I get it, it's a palace, so it's overstated, but it somehow keeps the feel that if you lived there, it would still feel like a home.

Here's Chandana, Surekha and I in the courtyard.

4. Restoration / Hotel:

The Taj Hotel Group, which operates 5 star hotels all over India, has leased Falaknama palace from the Nizam foundation.  They then undertook a massive 10 year restoration of the entire hotel complex.  They've done an amazing job of making the palace be what it was back in the early 1900s.  For example, the gent's lounge is exactly as it was back then.  You can walk up to the bar and order a drink.  You can sit in the drawing room and read a book.  Note that you've got to be willing to pay big money to do so.  The smallest room goes for around $450 US per night.  The VIP suites are $11,000 a night.

Bottom line is that if you've got the money and you want to go back in time to live like a king, you can literally do it here at Falaknama.

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Here are some more photos of our group that evening.  After taking the tour, we headed to the restaurant for an amazing dinner and a lot of great conversation:

(Surekha, Vishwa, Ganesh, Chandana, and me)

Metro to Koti

Chris Eilertson is in India as well.  He joined Ganesh and I on our adventure to take the metro down to Koti.  Koti is in the old city of Hyderabad, it's a very different place to the tall buildings and wide roads here in HiTech City.  People are going every which way, there are street vendors selling everything from fresh sugarcane juice, to clothes and household items.

The metro was under construction the first time I visited Hyderabad. it's now up and running with 3 lines and more on the way.  For a city with the kind of traffic that Hyderabad suffers from, these sorts of large infrastructure projects are essential.

The metro is a really impressive setup.  Large, safe, clean, air conditioned cars and large stations.  The system runs on elevated lines, which means that it can get right in to the areas of the city that are worst affected by traffic.

One of the Koti intersections with the metro line on the right side:

Once we got to Koti, Ganesh was nice enough to treat us to some shopping where I got a traditional south Indian kurta and pants, plus a nice short one.  Here's me and Ganesh with my short kurta:

Idli - Breakfast Staple

Here in the south of India, Idlis are very popular for breakfast.  They're kind of like a warm, spongy rice cake.  More info here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idli

As they note in the wikipedia article, the fermented lentils that are added to the batter break down the starches in the rice so that you have cake that's packed with energy.  You typically eat these with a little chutney, or in my case a lot (on top).  Anyway, it's a nice fast breakfast!

Hyderabad Craft Brewing

Monday evening a few folks from the team took me out to one of Hyderabad's new craft breweries, Prost Brewing.  Being from San Diego, where we've got more than 100 craft breweries and being a home brewer, it's very interesting to compare what I know to what's going on in Hyderabad.  Just the fact that people are brewing craft beer in this country is a big accomplishment.  When you think about all of the government red tape and logistical challenges that stand in your way, such as permits and sourcing climate sensitive ingredients like hops and yeast, you realize how impressive it is to simply start and run a brewery here.

As always in Hyderabad, the food was plentiful, and in the case of Prost, the beer was strong:

Day 1 - Nothing Ever Stands in the Way of Progress

I remember 15 years ago when I started at Qualcomm and we as a company started working with TCS, an Indian consulting/outsourcing firm.  It was a big change for those of us in Qualcomm IT.  We'd never worked with people in different time zones, never mind people who were now on the other side of the planet.

7 or 8 years later, Qualcomm established its own office and employee IT presence, in Hyderabad, reducing our TCS footprint a bit.  When we established what we call QIPL, we moved a fair bit of our TCS headcount in to the QIPL office.  We also obviously converted some of our San Diego workforce in to India employees.

In 2012 when I first came to Hyderabad and Hitech city, it was eye opening.  Standing at my hotel window and looking around at all the big buildings, filled with employees of big American and European companies, like Bank of America, Deloitte, Amazon, Broadcom, etc; you realized that the world just wasn't the same as it was 10 years earlier. 

When it started, QIPL IT had 1 floor in one small building.  Now Qualcomm has 5000 employees in Hyderabad (mostly Engineering, but still a lot of IT).  Now when you walk the streets of Hitech city, you see Qualcomm buildings everywhere.  When you stay at the Westin hotel, which sits at the centre of the city, you run in to one Qualcomm San Diego employee after another.  It's very eye opening and an amazing statement of all that our India employees have accomplished.  These days QIPL and Bangalore Engineering crank out entire modem and processor products on their own.  QIPL IT owns our global operations function.  India has become a core of what we do as a company.

I'm back for the 3rd installment

I flew in to Mumbai this time.  Shweta is going to come join me next week in her hometown, Mumbai.  So I flew here.  I'm flying return to Hyderabad today.  1 Week there for work and then we'll have two weeks together to visit her family.

Super excited.