Blink. And things change.
Daily musings #610- Monday, 3 October 2022
I spent the weekend in Hyderabad with my cousin. I had last visited her 13 years ago and the change was phenomenal. What was greenery and low-rise buildings were filled with clusters of high rises, 25 floors, 30 floors, 50-60 floors, and some over 100 floors. And the population had doubled.
This change is no different from what is happening in over 25 cities in China which have all become mega-cities in the last 20 years - from nothing to cities with millions in population.
Compared to change in developed countries, here you blink and presto things change.
I last visited another city - Bangalore in 2019 the mecca of IT outsourcing in the world. My previous visit to Bangalore was 15 years before that and I observed exactly the same type of change. I used to live in Banglore in the late 90s and boom, it was a boom town. A brand new airport two hours away from downtown in rush time traffic, but built to better than global standards or anything that I had seen in the West.
Hyderabad is in my guess the next Bangalore and might be the better Bangalore than Bangalore should have been. The coherence in planning infrastructure seems better than in Bangalore with its new airport way better than Bangalore and road infrastructure planned to keep traffic moving, unlike Bangalore.
It is interesting to the contrast between growth in a developing country compared to stable slow, sometimes mind-numbingly slow growth in North America where I live.
Blink and things are going to change again. And many of us living in cozy Europe and the Americas have limited awareness of this change happening that we don’t see.
Blink harder. You might miss it and get left out.