After the ushering in of Globalisation, Hyderabad as the capital of earlier united Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states went through rapid economic and social changes. Firstly, the rise of terrorism in the world, given rise to already misplaced panic over Islam. Hyderabad was a target of three terrorist bombings in 2007 and 2013. Secondly, the neo-liberal city has failed to include the poor, lower caste and ‘undesirable others’ and the marginalised minority community of Muslims now live in the fear of being terror suspects. In this background, this paper studied two Telugu films Khadgam (2002) and Vedam (2010) - a regional language cinema from the southern states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. These two movies represent different characters from different social, economic and religious backgrounds in the neo-liberal and terrorised city.
These characters’ association with the city and how each of them perceives, conceives and lives in the Hyderabad city is unravelled. The characters are some of metropolis tropes that Georg Simmel discusses – poor, sex-worker, stranger (migrant) and Muslims (other). The paper tried to understand the alienation and belonging in the urban spaces which are constantly under threat of violence (terrorist attacks). The paper concludes that Hyderabad citizens try to rewrite and rearrange the urban spaces ascribing new meanings on these spaces, by fighting and surviving individual battles and collectively the bigger threat of terrorist attacks. This paper tried to explore the alienation in the city which is manifested as the terrorist attack on the city. The effects of advent of globalisation, and the rise of global terrorism on urban experience of different groups in the films is explored.