Days Off

My counterpart professor, Joe, and I had the day off Thursday, and Woxsen graciously provided us a driver. First stop: The Salar Jung Museum. It's a lovely building focused mostly, but not entirely, on various aspects of the local history. There's the textiles, and the furniture, and the pottery, and the weapons rooms (note: there were no women in the weapons room; I guess that's a thing), but what intrigued us most were the manuscripts. Mostly Qurans, but a few other fine examples of the art as well.

The majority used conventional script, with all the inlays and whatnot, but a few stood out, being far ahead of their time. The practice of typography was alive and well in these parts over a thousand years ago, and no one would bat an eye if something like these showed up on the fuselage of a Gulf carrier.

There is also the room of canes. Having been on one earlier this year, it held a particular fascination for me: how could I have pimped it up more? There are canes with skulls and monkey heads, with a button on the back that makes the jaw open. There are hand grips in the shape of dogs and birds and women's legs. There are canes that enclose timepieces, compasses, and likely knives. Alas, a missed opportunity.

They also feature statue of the Veiled Rebecca, a 17th century Italian Import. I don't know what it's doing here, but they're mighty proud of it.

We stopped by another museum, the Nizam, in the Muslim quarter (you can tell--the signs are printed in Urdu instead of Telugu). It dedicates itself to the past century, and it advertises a serious silver fetish: silver cigar boxes, silver scroll canisters, silver models of the local market, the local dam, the local sanitarium, etc. Sorry, no pictures allowed.

From there, the Charminar, which is kind of the center of town. Also the preferred suicide venue for the despondent. Now, Woxsen had advertised our driver as a serious, weave-through-the-traffic, anywhere-you-want-to-go, knows-the-streets-like-you-know-the-back-of-your-wife kind of guy. So I'm not sure why we had to stop and ask directions six times. But we got there.

Now, this is Joe's first time in India, and I've been known to take delight in thrusting people into the maelstrom, and this one has it all: ubiquitous hawkers of fake Ray Bans, the blind and the lame, pushy silver merchants, platters of samosas going by on people's heads, dead animals, gaggles of burkas traveling in formation, desperate, grabby beggars, and near-lethal traffic. He did alright. More frightening, I'm starting to feel comfortable here.