Lights Camera & some serious Action!- Ramoji Film City- Hyderabad

Every trip to Hyderabad is all about eating biryani at Paradise, eating the Andhra thali(which happens to be my favourite cuisine)and buying cookies from Karachi bakery. In my many visits here, I had been nearly everywhere from the gorgeous Golconda fort to the charismatic Charminar, but this time I want to see something more glitzy and glamorous!

So this time, I pester my friend until she agrees to come along with me to Ramoji Film city. Built across 1,666 acres, this is till date the world’s largest film studio complex. Another USP of the place is that it features in the top 5 haunted places in India!

As always I was excited about it, I had done some homework and read that, ‘this place was so vast with such varied set ups that a film maker can enter with a script and walk out with a whole film.’ #WHOAA...

Situated 40 kms from Hyderabad, reaching this place is a bit cumbersome but then good things are never near. Thankfully I had my friend along who is a localite and without her intervention in the local language; I wouldn't have made it to this place for sure!

Absolutely clueless on where to start, we enter the Wild Wild West section! The complete set up was something out of a cow boy movie with wooden houses on both the sides with bars which led to nowhere and stables with wooden horse!

After some funnies, we still move around lost hopelessly in the crowd until we reach a bus stop. These open red coaches take you around the film city and suddenly from the perfectly manicured Mughal gardens of Delhi you enter the streets of Vasco’s market! 

As the bus moves you move from one era to another.

At some places I could not believe that it was all a film set, it looked so freaking real that you would expect resident’s to step out of these houses any minute.

Unlike me, if you are into Bollywood, you will be able to spot many locations where movies have been shot earlier. I managed to spot two places; one was this beautiful garden with white eerie legs sticking out, one song from the movie ‘Dirty Picture’ was shot here. I also saw MunnaBhai MBBS’s hospital here! Every time I saw some place I had seen in movies I would shriek like a schoolgirl while my friend rolled her eyes at me!

Moving ahead we walked around from Chinese Zen gardens (complete with Chinese style huts and gardens, fountains and streams) to the Butterfly gardens (which is full of butterflies of all sorts roaming freely) to the Buddha caves (with giant size Buddha) and what not! We ran around the trees pretending to be some heroines and imagined how it would be to actually be one! I guess all this sudden transitions from one amazing location to another in minutes was tickling my senses in a crazy way!

The only place my friend totally flipped her lid was at the Kings court, a place heavily jewelled with gold and coloured windows. It was the place where mythological period movies like Mahabharata and Ramayan was shot! The king’s court had everything from his throne to the courtier’s thrones and statues of dancing women in gold (which was fake of course!)

the pretty Apsaras <3

Though this place has other interesting things to do, like stunt shows and movie shows, honestly I wasn’t interested; I just wanted to spend more time exploring the global pot pourri of places, my very own Narnia for the day!

Finally as the day ended, we bade farewell to this exotic (fake) place and headed towards the airport (fake again) and boarded our very own aircraft (ha ha...F. A. K. E but fun)!

If only airlines had this much leg space!!

Catching our flight at the Ramoji International Airport! *which has only the arrival terminal*

Unfortunately, I did not manage to see any film shooting in progress and fortunately, I did not see any ghost either! So haunted or not, you must visit this place at least once, at least for the fun of it!

#Tip: Do not attempt to visit during the summer season. It can KILL you, literally!