Sunday, February 18, 2007

Are you there?

I slept a little early yesterday. At 12 midnight. I was tired and sleepy. The day before it was 3:30 am by the time I went to bed. For 2 nights now, I have been sleeping at the place I have always wanted sleep - in the living room, on the 'divan'. I do have place to be inside any of the bedrooms but I am preferring this one!

On Saturday I had my classes till 12:30 pm but I was there till 4 with friends. I reached my grandmothers' house around 4:45 pm and was at CL just after 6:30 pm. The class started 10 minutes late. We had a topic test in Algebra and I scored above average Alhamdulillah. Even today, Sunday, we had a test - review test in Algebra. We didn't evaluate our scripts. We just discussed them.

After reaching home today, when my father saw me removing my shoes, he asked me to keep them on as we would be going to his friend's house's construction site. I said I will put it on when we are leaving. I had my breakfast at 12:30 pm and we left home just after that. My aunt and cousin were with us. We reached home at 5 pm after having a vegetarian lunch at a restaurant 'Raaga' on the ring road near Atta Poor. I am not sure of the name of the place.

The construction site of the house told me something - I may never get to see a better house in Hyderabad unless I get one constructed for myself! I am not kidding. It is just on the banks of Miralam Lake over looking and zoological park. The place has a lot of green cover. The house is being constructed after cutting down tonnes of rock on the hillock the site is occupying.

They did a lot of dynamite explosions and almost half the hill had to be cut down for the dream house. The house it half into the rocks. The same rocks formations have been used to decorate the house from inside. There are around 7 bedrooms if I can remember it perfectly. There are many halls, a place of bar, swimming pools, bathrooms with jacuzzi, ponds of ducks, 5 to 6 fountains - two of them inside the house, barbecue place, fruit garden, cacti garden, rose garden, 3 lion faces and a dolphin statue greeting the visitors at the entrance from the pond having a fountain, a separate guest house, servant quarters ... the list goes on.

The house will be built in another 4 to 5 months. The interior designing will be done once the house is completed, the outside landscaping will take time. The constructor and architect is a cousin of mine who has worked for several years in Dubai. He has amazing knowledge of different construction materials and he is very creative and daring. He specially got several huge rocks moved to the lawns to get the perfect landscaping. That costed a lot of money and the moving of those boulders was so impossible and dangerous that one of the laborers escaped death narrowly!

He explained us everything that has been planned. The placing of the porcelain, the lions and the dolphin, the work on the walls, the birds that will be imported to be displayed in a cage that will appear in the hall from the side wall with the huge rocks int eh background, the aquarium, the views from the special master bedroom and the other rooms - the bed in the master bedroom will be placed such that when a person opens his eyes, he will find the big green doom of a mosque near by, and when he turns, he will find Falaknuma Palace, Mecca Masjid and Chaarminar from the window - and every minute he explained us made that place more amazing and unbelievable. The location of the house makes a lot of difference. The architect has carved the difference into a thing of beauty and joy.

There is a special plan for having the ducks. They will live in a pond specially made for them, come out of it at some time of the day, stroll around the place for sometime, show their neck movements whenever some visitor arrives and go back to their pond when there is nobody around. They will be trained for all this. I understand this sounds unbelievable. there are many things we don't believe but understand ourselves as silly when we actually see them in our eyes.

There are many designs being used for the false ceiling and one of the rooms will have the ceiling displaying the first 'kalima' of Islam. My father's friend is an atheist and he keeps good knowledge of all religions.

When I first entered, I just saw a single floor from outside. I saw so many rooms there itself with a huge entrance hall and surrounding areas. There were four bedrooms on every corner of this hall with each of them providing very carefully selected and designed views of the lake and the hills. The my father took me to the terrace. It was amazing. It has been designed to cater to open air parties. The laws too are specially designed for parties with a separate room from where food can be served. the sceneries from the terrace too were awesome. Then he took us to the floor below the main floor I had seen initially. I couldn't believe that there was a flood below.

this floor had a big hall again with a bar attached to it. The planning here too was amazing with rock formations glamorizing the place. The outside view from here too was breathtaking. There was another bedroom here and a lot of space - to breath!

Then we went to the floor below! There wasn't much here except for a single room that looked, in a way, like the most soothing places of all that we had seen previously. It was a small room hanging from the rest of the house almost in the air - it was on ground, but it seemed like that, and it was jetting out into the lake - ostensibly; appearing like that. It had only rocks as one of it's walls. The whole place was like a fort on a hillock with beautiful gardens all around!

Tis part was on the hillock. At the ground-level is the swimming pool and the pond for the ducks, and the laws with other things. There is a circular column that rises from the bed of the swimming pool and goes up to support a hut like open structure having a kind of umbrella on it. The only way to get to that place is a bridge - just 2 feet wide! I can imagine how beautiful it will look once everything is ready. It will be difficult for any person to even think that she is in India!

All this comes at a price. I can't mention the amount being spent. If I estimate the whole expenditure in dollars, the word starting with 'm' will be used. The word will be plural to express the size of the bank account a person needs to have to afford such a beauty.

I even played cricket there - had a great time with everything. We took many pictures of the palace. Everything is still under construction but still, it is already mesmerizing. My present screen name of Orkut is 'Island Dreams'!

Later in the evening we went to my father's paternal cousin's wedding. It was grand. Very grand. Almost all of the Andhra Pradesh's State Assembly was there - Chandra Babu Naidu, Rajashekhar Reddy, and all the MLA's and other ministers I am sure. Sania Mirza, Salman Khan, many Tollywood - Telugu - actors, the cast of the movie 'Angreez', and several other people. I hardly saw any of them. Just came to know that they were there. We reached the place late. The traffic was too much with so many ministers making the roads and the people on the roads to stop moving. The security was brilliant. The function was grand. the food served was not hot. The taste was fine.

I reached home and finally appeared only on Yahoo messenger after more than 24 hours! It was such a fine feeling to have 2 of my nicest friends online. I have college tomorrow and the OOSD (Object Oriented Systems Design) lab where I have to submit the first part of our case study along with my teammates. I took a lot of printouts just sometime back. But I don't think we are done. These prints, I hope, will be enough to keep our lecturer cool!

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