A 'Tower'ing task ahead

Finally, finally, we got er.. half of the finalization of our project work for the final year. After travelling a total distance of 70KM today, I still wonder how I have something left in me to post today, maybe it's the excitement that is keeping me up. After the usual long journey down the inner ring road, we reached the 'Imarat', and had the initial shocker. 2 of our group were not coming today which meant whatever's done is done only for the other 4. After that, when we entered the Administration, we had another shocker. The receptionist asked us to go back home and come on Monday or something because we didn't have all the formalities completed. But after a few hours and phone calls and lunch, we managed to get the clearance from the administration and we were asked to go to the security desk for the passes. That set off a series of trips between the HRD, and Security and Administration and our Project Guides, and each of them were separated by at least 3KM of black road. WoW! Hell ride! Under the hot sun, always following the sign boards of keeping to the left, we covered a total distance of 20KM within the campus itself.

Clearly, there were more buildings than people in there. The population density at an average can be taken as 1 person per square kilometer, which is crazy!! Our initial achievement was being able to get into the campus. Once we did, all we could do was gape at the vastness of the whole thing. We were going round complete hills! There were guard towers everywhere. Nobody knows who is looking at whom at what time, and the security guards stand 24X7 behind heaps of sacks as if on war front. Everything was mammoth. It was too much to take in for a single day. The area where my group's project is to be done was deceptive. From outside, it looked like a 3 storyed building. From the inside, it's a megafactory. There are no 3 storeys. There's only 1 extending all the way to the roof. The machinery had danger signs everywhere. There buses roaming around carrying missile names... (what?!?!) The missile name denotes that the people travelling in that bus are working on that missile.. That was downright boggling... We couldn't make head or tail of anything in there. Hopefully, in a few days, things will get better. The worst part was, almost no electronic device is allowed inside, except ofcourse tiny stuff like a watch. No phone, no 'Pen Drivers' (whatever that meant!!), no CDs, nothing..

After all this travel and crazy formalities, we found out that we had completed only half of the process of getting in. We could have finished it today, but we were met with their typical timing. It was 4:00PM and bang! All doors were shut, vehicles were rolling out at top speed. Even the security were closing up. We rushed in for a last minute reclaim of our 'belongings' and security forms. And soon we hit the road and the realization hit me back. We are into something big. Though what we do won't be very big, we are still into something big. Something that shows more than what it actually is, or something that hides more than what it shows. Either way, it's something big, and there was an eerie feel to everything, especially the sight of those guard towers and security checks... Didn't feel like a place near Hyderabad.

And I 'liked + disliked' it... final say for the day.