I have come to eventually like Hyderabad. This is my second time that I have visited the place. I now see why a lot of my friends swear by this city.

Hyderabad just feels familiar. Maybe its because almost everyone here talks in Hindi which makes the place feels homely considering it’s located in South India. The southern states have their own set of languages like Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam and Kannada which have been difficult for me to pick up. And the prevalence of Hindi in Hyderabad definitely helps.

The weather here is fabulous. Having lived around four years in Bangalore which has one of the nicest weather of any metro city, I find the weather of Hyderabad almost comparable to Bangalore at least in the non-summer months. The humidity is a bit higher than the extremely dry Bangalore weather but not by much. The city though makes it up with regular showers of rain . Both the times I have been here, I have experienced cloudy windy rain showers - my kind of weather.

The rain in Hyderabad is an altogether different beast. It doesn’t rain, but pours. This reminds me a lot of the rain in my native of Cuttack, Odisha where it sometimes used to rain for days on end. Odisha, having a lot of it districts in the coast of the Bay of Bengal, gets its fair share of annual cyclones and hurricanes. In one sense the state receives a substantial amount of its monsoon rain in this form. The Bangalore rain in contrast is usually a predictable and quieter affair. It rains usually late in the night and evenings between 4 to 6 pm. And the rain is gentle. There is no twisting of electric poles or uprooting of decade old banyan trees as it happens so often during the monsoon season in Odisha.

Today in Hyderabad, on seeing the thick downpour of rain from underneath a shelter I am stuck, it reminds me a lot of my hometown. As I said before, I like Hydrabad.