[Hyderabad, May 2025] Day 3 - Ginger Bugs and Idlis

Jet lag causes some really interesting sleep patterns. Last we met our intrepid adventurer, he was falling unconscious at 8:30PM after his first day at the office in Hyderabad. This provoked waking up at 3:00AM, bright-eyed and ready to face the day -- a day which hadn't even remotely begun yet. Instead of trying to go back to sleep immediately, I pulled out a tool from the insomniac's kit -- don't lie in bed thinking about how you're not sleeping. Instead, get up, do something, engage the mind for a few minutes, and then try again later. Ideally, this activity doesn't involve screens because staring at the bright light generated from them isn't particularly conducive to settling the mind. Following world news these days doesn't help either. The screen part, I ignored. Screens are more or less all I have with me on this trip -- my phone, my computer, my Nintendo Switch, those items and their subsequent accessories were practically my entire loadout for this trip, beyond clothing and toiletries.

I started writing the first day's blog post. These posts take me about three hours to pull together, so getting a head start is essential on a schedule where I only have a few hours here and there in the day to myself. When I ran out of steam there, I listened to part of the audiobook I was reading-- the first book in the Murderbot Diaries series. This isn't a book blog, so I won't do a comprehensive review of the plot here. But the one-liner is that it's the internal monologue of a sentient cyborg who overrides his programming and spends much of his newfound freedom consuming schlocky media while pretending to be 'normal'. It clearly has a strong autism metaphor just under the surface of the story, and it's also hilarious.

After a few chapters of that, I was ready to return to bed. I was graced with a few more hours of sleep before committing to being up for the day. A quick glance out the hotel room window showed it was going to be cloudier, but the threat of constant rain that was prophesied by the weather app had still not come to pass; perhaps tomorrow. It says 80% chance tomorrow. We'll see. 

I had a few hours to kill before I was expected at the office, so I decided to risk watching a little Indian television. I landed on a cricket match. Cricket is India's national sport, and they take it just as seriously as most of Europe takes football (not the American kind). Watching the bowlers and the wickets and the silly-mid-offs was baffling stuff, but the delightfully incomprehensible game was a pleasant backdrop to finishing up that blog post. Maybe someday I'll take the time to sift through the complexities...but don't count on it. I've never been a sports person.

Idlis with coconut chutney
and Sambar 

I was super excited about the hotel breakfast today because now I could dig into Southern Indian breakfast traditions, including something I'd really looked forward to -- idlis! Idlis (I *think* this is how you pluralize it. A single one is called an idli) are fluffy little discs of fermented rice flour, water, and lentils. The fermentation makes them slightly sour, which makes them a great breakfast food. Beyond the sourness, they taste of very little, but that's also the point, because it makes idlis the perfect medium to absorb other flavors, and in Southern India, there are a few very common accompaniments.

The first is sambar, and it's one of those dishes that varies pretty broadly from household to household. At its heart, it's a vegetable stew (like many dishes here), made predominantly from onions, lentils, a spice blend, and almost always contains 'vegetable drumstick', which, upon doing some research, is the pod of the Moringa plant. It's a bit stalky, and it's what makes sambar a 'healthy' meal, as the pods are loaded with antioxidants and liver-supporting enzymes (which I could always use).

The second common accompaniment is coconut chutney. Folks like me growing up in the 1980s in the US may well remember a very specific type of chutney that was common in US supermarkets. It was very sweet and sour, chunky and loaded with tamarind and mysterious fruits (of which raisins were very prevalent). In reality, this type of chutney was more of a colonial British invention. Chutney in India, particularly Southern India, is infinitely variable; they are really a spectrum of saucy accompaniments made often from tomatoes, peanuts, tamarind, coconut, green chilies, mint, and countless other things. One of the most commonly consumed for breakfast with idlis is coconut chutney.

The first thing I noted when digging into the grainy-looking white paste with my idli was that it was surprisingly not at all sweet. Much in the way that young coconut flesh scooped right out of a coconut has a savory and complex taste, so too coconut chutney. Despite looking grainy, it's actually quite soft and smooth. Chilies, tamarind, and coriander make an appearance as well. It was very pleasant.

Dosa with accompaniments.
I forgot to take a picture before digging in.

I think seeing that I was eating more or less a traditional Southern Indian breakfast, one of the waiters (for there were many) decided I should like to try a dosa as well. I've said before that I can't eat much these days, but I was *offered* a dosa and by the gods, I was going to take it. It arrived in all its thin, crisp-chewy goodness on a palette with a bevy of chutneys. It was so good that I ate most of it, despite wanting to explode. Dosa is made with basically the same ingredients as idlis, but instead of being steamed into a thick, white, chewy disc, it is treated like crepe batter, spread into a very thin pancake on a hot griddle with ghee. It's sour because it is fermented, just like idlis. The sourness is more pronounced in dosa, possibly due to the cooking method.

My day at the office was packed with meet-and-greets. The walk to the office was just as unpleasant as the day before, except it was a bit hotter today. It was hitting 92°F by 11am, with nearly 100% humidity. I was sweating through my shirt before I got to the first turn.

Some of the little treats people
kept bringing to my desk

One of the interesting cultural behaviors I noticed in the office today was that many people came up to my desk and gave me little gifts -- water bottles, soda, little cookies. They didn't even want to speak, really, just give me a gift and leave. The consensus on the internet is that this is very common. It was certainly charming. One of the gents in the office is known for making a gently fermented drink called 'ginger bug', which, despite its menacing name, is really just an infused fermented fruit soda. It was against my better judgment that I decided to try it. One of the things I was warned about was that drinking the municipal water was a no-no, not because it's polluted or anything, but because the bacterial make-up is just so different than that of North America, that it will inevitably give you the trots. I did it anyway, reader...and so far I have not paid the price. The drink was light and refreshing, not nearly as aggressively sweet or sour as kombucha. He had me try a blueberry version. Tomorrow, he wants me to try a rose and raspberry variety. We'll see. I want to! I also don't want to spend my return flight running to the airplane bathroom.

He and a few other guys stood around with me in a very 'at the water cooler' moment, drinking ginger bug and chatting. They eagerly shared their opinions of the other major cities of India. A lot of people move here from other places in India to work for the big tech companies here in Hyderabad. The guys at the studio claim Hyderabad is the best of the lot because it's so small (it has an urban center of 9 million people, friends). They aired their grievances with the other major cities and particularly spoke harshly of Mumbai, primarily due to its intense population density. The urban area of Mumbai has a population of *18 million*!

I'll reiterate that everyone here has been absolutely lovely. Friendly, chatty, and while sometimes shy, always happy to talk casually with me. I got to join some of the team at their office cafeteria, and they had prepared a box lunch for me that consisted of a huge bowl of chicken biryani, which is the crowning glory of Hyderabadi dishes. Served with raita and the ubiquitous chutneys, this savory-sweet rice dish typically has peas, sautéed onions, cardamom, cinnamon, curry leaves, and chilies. The cafeteria biryani was mild, but I've been told that typically most Hyderabadi food is quite spicy. I'm certain everything in the hotel is tragically toned down for Westerners, but even the biryani in the cafeteria here wasn't particularly spicy. Just a hint. Rolling out of the cafeteria (they eat big lunches!), 

The lanes are more like suggestions than rules

I spent the rest of the day in meetings with everyone under the stars and returned to the hotel around 5pm in a profound haze of jet lag. Through sheer will alone, I kept myself from going immediately to bed at 5pm. I took it easy -- a bath and a trip to the rooftop bar (the other bar at the hotel). The rooftop bar was nice, although the ambience of the street below was not particularly relaxing due to the sheer chaos of the roads at rush hour here. The lanes are more like suggestions, and as far as I could see, there are very few traffic lights. While using car horns as a primary means of communication was prevalent in Cairo, it has nothing to the level of cacophony on the Hyderabad streets at 5:30pm.

I won't dwell on my evening meal and cocktails because I kept it simple tonight due to the amount of food I'd consumed during the rest of the day. A few gin martinis and some deep-fried lamb kebabs, which with mint chutney were all I had, and I couldn't even finish that. But despite the street symphony, I really enjoyed sitting on the 40th floor looking out over the massive city in relative peace, in the wet-hot breeze of early evening in India.

Tomorrow looks a lot like today, with wall-to-wall meetings in the plan. Some other members of my team are arriving here to help with knowledge transfers with their counterparts. Tomorrow I'm having lunch with a small bunch of people outside the office, which should be fun. Until then, dear readers.