When fashion designer Vinita Pittie moved to the city as a 16-year-old in 1977, the first thing she noticed was the Hyderabadi stereotype we’re all accustomed to — how laidback the city was.
“If you called the plumber or the electrician, or the jeweller to deliver a product, they would say, ‘Haan, haan. I’m reaching.’ And they wouldn’t reach until the next day! And then you had to rap them,” she says with a laugh.
But through the years, Vinita has not just warmed up to the city, but also fallen in love with it. Living in an ancestral, 250-year-old home in Begum Bazaar, the hustle and bustle of the area won her over. “I was very intrigued by the cycle-rickshaws, where one would have to sit cross-legged. I always used to wonder, are they even comfortable? Begum Bazaar has so many sari shops, so women would crouch in those rickshaws, and go around to shop, and it was just so cute!”
“And the food!” Vinita adds, “Though a vegetarian, there’s the mirchi bhajji, alu toast, the pakodas... The (Begum Bazaar) crossroads area is full of mouth-watering street food. You salivate even if you talk about it!”
But more than anything, it was the people that made her really understand the spirit of Hyderabad. “The people of Hyderabad have always been very gentle, and soft-spoken, and use a high-level of language. I’ve seen two people fight and woh bhi ‘aap-aap’ karke ladte hain. And the colloquial dialect is so quaint!” she says, adding that even she has begun speaking the same way: “Even today, when you’re talking to people from outside Hyderabad you speak in their proper language, but the minute you turn your face and start talking to a fellow Hyderabadi you get back to that language.”
And even though the city’s has become a modern metro, the old city is where its real charm lies, Vinita says. “‘Laad’ means ‘to adore’ and ‘to pamper’, so when you go to Laad Bazaar it’s truly a place to pamper yourself. You have these modern markets today, but I always say: The lungs and the heart of the city is here in the Old City,” she says.
Of course, there are a few things she’d like to change about the city: “We would be like any other town in Turkey or where people go to for their holidays in Morocco, if we could maintain our cleanliness and hygiene.”
