Biscuits with the Brothers

A short trip to Hyderabad, a city with lots of bright and shiny new roads and buildings and other accoutrements of India’s IT revolution. The bright and shiny new airport proudly announces “Voted First Place in International Airport Awards - 5 to 15 million passengers category”. Undoubtedly it is high-quality, in a 21st century consumerist way, i.e. the quality mainly comes in the form of many lovely opportunities to buy stuff that you don’t need or even really want but which help to fill the ever-increasing amounts of time you have to spend there.

(Who votes for these things anyway? Perhaps you have to descend to the level of voting in an International Airport Award before you can recognise the gaping chasm where your soul was supposed to be – about which more in a moment…)

Excitingly, among all the bright and shiny things are squillions of enormous boulders, dotting the landscape and looking like an early 1980s Doctor Who episode that was supposed to be set on the planet Flomp but was actually filmed in a quarry outside Middlesbrough.

We meet the Brothers from Brahma Kumaris, who have opened an enormous new centre here. We are supposed to just say hello but they invite us in for tea and biscuits and a discussion about spiritual growth, which it would be rude not to accept. I quickly pick up that as long as you say ‘Om Shanti’ regularly and with great solemnity, and call everyone ‘Brother’, you can’t go far wrong. There are lots of people on the internet who think that Brahma Kumaris is a dangerous cult etc, but as far as I could tell their only interests are peace and biscuits. Now there’s a recruitment slogan if ever I heard one.

My host asks me what I’m doing in the evening, and if I’d like him to take me to Paradise? Since two religious experiences in one day would be at least one and a half too many, I’m instinctively wary; but it turns out to be a legendary – and huge – local restaurant, specialising in the famous Hyderabadi Biryani. They also have a local pudding called khubani ka meetha (basically, stewed apricots), which is absurdly sweet and frankly excessive after you’ve eaten a tempoload of rice. I leave from Hyderabad having grown, in so many ways.