Hyderabad Happenings

Yet Another Eatery

With so much happening, especially on the food side, I sometimes wish I could relocate to Jubilee Hills/Banjara Hills. If I’d been as interested in eating as I am in reading then maybe I would have done that long ago. Anyway, it isn’t my fault really but another eatery opened last week in Jubilee Hills/Banjara Hills. But I am not going to say much about it or crib too much about it. It isn’t that I am on the look out for such happenings in JH/BH but I have this habit of reading at least two other newspapers everyday other than The Hindu. A couple of days ago I saw an ad in the TOI ad for ‘The Buffet’ that is described in the ad as ‘the newest destination in town’ which incidentally is located in the GVK One Mall (Level 5) in Banjara Hills.

However ‘The Buffet’ doesn’t appear like the sort of fancy the eatery which will have the JH/BH crowd jumping into their fancy cars and rushing to it at the tiniest sign of hunger. The buffet at ‘The Buffet’ costs only Rs 249 which, like I said before, isn’t exactly something that will have the JH/BH crowd salivating. I mean you don’t drive five miles in a Rs 35 lakh Mercedes Benz ( or equivalent set of wheels) to eat a meal that costs less than two hundred and fifty rupees. It simply isn’t in their class though they wouldn’t mind it on those occasions when they are shopping their wallets off in the pricey stores at GVK One.


C6 Metamorphoses

The first city magazine of Hyderabad was Channel Six which until recently came out in a format slightly bigger than a post card. It was the definitive guide for site-seeing, shopping, events in Hyderabad that catered to a lot of visitors to Hyderabad. Many years ago when I was in that phase spouting poetry I won a prize for something I had written. The prize was a meal for two at a place called ‘Once Upon a Time’ but I was too nervous to go. So the prize went unavailed but I still have that issue somewhere that I show to everyone who tells me I cannot write anything, not even poetry.

Last week I happened to be in Landmark where I picked up a copy of something called C6 which I realized was Channel Six in a new avatar. At last count there were more than a dozen city magazines in Hyderabad like WOW Hyderabad, 040 and others which had good production values with glossy paper, colour photographs which C6 wasn’t able to match until now. I feel glad that it has come of age and ready to challenge the others. Amita Talwar is the soul behind C6 and coincidentally there was a big write up about her in The Hindu the other week.

In the November issue of Channel 6 I read an interview of Jyotirmaya Sharma, a regular fixture at literary events. I last saw him at the launch of ‘River of Smoke’ by Amitav Ghosh at The Park. Since he is a writer also I was not surprised to read that he was an ‘obsessive collector’ of fountain pens. So that’s one more high profile fountain pen collector in Hyderabad to talk about.