The terrace of the Ista Hotel’s Galerie restaurant in Hyderabad isn’t the place for a quiet dinner. Certainly the food is delicious – the chef, just returned from seven years at Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel, turns his hand equally to sea bass and lentils or a fish korma. The Indian Sauvignon Blanc is just the right side of crisp. And the bright colours of the bougainvillea glow in the candlelight. But several hundred metres away, men labour through the night on new buildings. The noise of a swinging crane can sound like an aircraft landing.
This, the newest part of Hyderabad – Cybertec City, just up the road from Hitec City and a good six miles from the heart of the old town – quite literally grows as you eat and sleep, offering ever more office accommodation for the city’s burgeoning new industries. At least 100 leading IT, financial services and biotechnology companies have opened here and more are on their way. Billboards announcing the imminent arrival of India’s first Texas Chicken outlet line the new roadsides as the shiny new buildings grow in the virgin, boulder-strewn landscape.
Fellow travellers at the Ista, so far Hyderabad’s only ultra-chic boutique hotel , include Swedes from the IT industry and operations managers from San Francisco working on US time (they go to bed after breakfast). A place that previously based its fortune on mining precious stones and dealing in pearls is not known as Cyberabad for nothing these days.
On another hill on the other side of town is a very different Hyderabad. The Falaknuma Palace is a building so impressive that its name, meaning Star of Heaven in Urdu, doesn’t seem inappropriate. Built between 1883 and 1893 and laid out in the shape of a scorpion, it was designed by an Italian architect in an Indo-Palladian style and was originally home to the then prime minister, who gallantly gave it to the ruling Nizam after he had made it clear that he would quite like to move in. But from June, when it becomes the jewel in the Taj Hotel Group’s crown, you will be able to enter its incredible rooms again – including a replica of the library at Windsor Castle – and admire some of the 25,000 objets d’art that were saved as it decayed through several decades of non-occupation (though thousands more have been lost).
In Hyderabad, the past and the future exist in a constant collision, but a visit to Ramoji Film City grounds you firmly in the present. Spread over 1,666 acres (with a couple of miles of road for chase scenes), employing 7,500 staff and churning out around 308 full-length feature films a year, this is the beating heart of Tollywood – the name for the southern states’ film industry that uses the Tegulu language. In a country where film rules supreme, Hyderabad’s status as its second biggest film producer is something to be proud of.
On the day I visit, 29-year-old Ashok G is directing a Tollywood teen flick. Like Cybertec City, Ashok is part of the new Hyderabad. ‘Costs are going up as artists demand higher and higher fees,’ he explains. ‘ They think their face sells the film, but I’m concentrating on the concept. I want to use good screenplays and life-related stories. The majority of the audience is from the slums and they want action and sentimentality. But there is another audience, a new middle class working here in IT, and they are interested in something based on a good narrative, rather than a big name.’
Read on for a Tollywood funfair and the place to buy glittering bargain bangles.
Get off the tourist trail and explore Ladakh, one of India's most stunning regions - but it's not for the faint-hearted.
