THREE in the morning and, somewhere near Nowherenagar, the man in the next curtained compartment in the second-class sleeper carriage on the Bombay to Hyderabad Express seems about to depart this existence.

His thunderous “ech-how-har!” has been getting worse for an hour and makes me wonder about avian flu. Every single soul in the curtain-divided carriage must be able to hear him, but all remain quiet. This is a country that knows how to be patient.

At seven we are passing through the countryside of northern Karnataka and into Andhra Pradesh. The green and brown flatness is broken up by tamarind and red-flowered gulmohur trees. Everything is low — the houses, station buildings, huts — only the cathedral bulks of cement works rise occasionally above the plain. The farmers are out in the sugar cane fields, driving the bullocks that pull the wooden ploughs.

Waking up on the upper bunk opposite is Mr M. Prabhakar Rao. Born in the weeks after independence in 1947 and now about to retire, the agreeable Mr Rao wishes to convert me to the cause of Her Holiness Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, and awaken my sacred energy — which, after a night of ech-how-har, could do with some awakening.

If I summon up the Divine Cool Breeze then I will “know everything”, says Mr Rao, who works, it turns out, at the Department of Atomic Energy nuclear fuel complex in Hyderabad.

If another passenger, a smiling 20-year-old named Serena, knows everything, then she is wasting her evenings studying by correspondence course for her BA in business administration. By day, however, she is a call- centre wallah. She spent a few months cold-calling Brits for a credit card company, but now she fields 70 or 80 calls a day from doctors’ offices in America, inquiring into the status of patients’ policies. Serena looks them up and discovers whether Labelle from Tucson has dependent auto-maternity or not. She is travelling back late from her parents’ home in Poona because today is a holiday. In India, I ask? No, she replies. In America.

Serena earns 20,000 rupees (£237) a month, more than her mother, secretary to an MD, made at the age of 45. More than a woman in her family has ever made. And, though she doesn’t tell me outright, it’s apparent that she lives in Hyderabad with her fiancé.

Serena’s adopted domicile is the chief city of the state of Andhra Pradesh, where the main language is Telugu, which I have never heard of before. Built around the shores of a lake, Hyderabad is cleaner, less mad and less interesting than Bombay. But what is going on there is remarkable — reminiscent of Shanghai, almost.

Take the road out of central Hyderabad and you soon come to a series of suburbs that are quite new. In Cyberabad and Hitec City the developments make the Bandra Kurla development in Bombay look like Legoland.

Everywhere, for miles around, in the shallow valleys and on the low ridges, building is going on or has just been finished.

There’s Dell’s long blue building, Microsoft’s deep rose one. There’s Wipro and Infosys, there’s the HSBC Hotel and Training Centre, the Hitex Exhibition Centre, the twin towers of the Indian School of Business. There’s Silicon Towers, Cybertower, the Cyber Gateway. And in between the offices are the brand new six and seven-storey housing schemes, with Floridian names such as Whitefields and Hill Ridge Springs (though my preference would be for the slightly more downmarket Kaisuri’s Supreme Enclave). And in between everything has been landscaped by the Hyderabad Urban Development Agency.

According to Syed Amin Jaffrey, a veteran local journalist, Hyderabad has not just changed physically. “The pace of life was very leisurely,” he told me. All that ended in 1995, he explained, when Chandrababu Naidu wrested the control of the ruling Telugu Desam Party from its founder, the former film star and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. T. Rama Rao. Who was also Mr Naidu’s father-in-law.

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