I’m Gujarati

Glory of Gujarat textbook

Gujarati = Affluent

I’ve always wanted to open a flower shop, but never had the courage. Till this moment.

 

I've always wanted to open a flower shop, but never had the courage. Till this moment.

Failure

I did a blog post on failure for the AIF fellows blog. Sachin, my AIF boss, called it a lesson in politics.

Ah, Diplomacy. One day, you and I will be friends.

Interaction: Revised – an examination of social and professional faux pas.

Scarlet Letter Woman

I go to a gym here. Yes, I have negative 100 assimilation points. It’s just like Crunch, but the trainers are nice and care about whether or not you do the exercises appropriately.

I met a guy at the gym. Not a guy guy. Like, a guy who’s interested in my work. Ok, maybe that’s naive. But aside from the being well-connected in Ahmedabad, he’s really not my type.  He asked to meet after work one day. So now the trainers tease me.  It’s awkward. 

 

Guy: Can you SMS me your number?  

Me: Uhh ok. Let me write it down so I don’t forget. [lift ball point pen, write SMS on my hand]

[Time Pass] 

Trainer: SMS!

Me: What?

Trainer: I’m just reminding you. You know? SMS. [wink]

 

Now, I look down at that ink SMS on my hand and feel like this Scarlet Letter Woman. But what really gets me is that so much business and networking happens this way, at social places like clubs and things. I wonder whether I would be so treated if I was a man.  Because there would be no question then, of the motives behind which I agreed to meet this person. Misguided? Clearly. 

But I don’t really care.

Straddling Worlds

This Saturday, I went to a modern dance performance at the Natrani Cafe at Darpana Academy of Performing Arts.  A rickshaw driver once described Darpana to me as, “Oh, you mean that place where all of the NRI’s [Non-resident Indians] and foreigner people go?”  Yes, that place.  That culture center, that escape into a parallel universe that aspires to beauty and is still very Amdavadi.

The dance performance Opus a Kath was by a French Dancer, Isabelle Anna, and her troupe Kaleidans’Scop.  They danced Kathak to Pundit J. Maharaj, Nono and Ravel.  The thing that struck me as I watched her shimmying janjra keep pace with Ravel’s ostinato snare was the way her performance reflected my life, and the lives of so many others.   I also walk with a foot on each ledge trying not to fall into a ravine. I am also both and neither. 

I’m not so sure that the world is getting smaller. Instead, the many worlds I inhabit simultaneously are coming closer and closer together. And so I find myself straddling worlds.

Sour Milk

Funny story:
 
Me: [to Ramilaben, our maid] Please put unused milk in the fridge so it doesn’t go bad.
Ramilaben: OK.
 
After I told Ramilaben this, I put the unused milk to set for yogurt. She put the pre-yogurt into the fridge. I have sour milk. 

I guess sometimes, despite our best efforts, we end up with sour milk.

Sari Day!

Sari Day happened a while ago, but these pictures never made it onto the blog. Check us out!!

Office Hotties.

Bijal, Belaben, Kruti, Keren, Meghna

No one will ask you to dance if you sit in a corner and sulk.

India makes me love my mom.  She’s a daughter of this country. The daughter no one wanted. The daughter they kicked out.  And she’s never looked back. 

I was one of those emo teens with my hair in my face and dark moods. I’ve never fully grown out of it.  At family functions, I was usually sulking in a dark corner, dressed in dowdy Indian clothes and trying to avoid the dancefloor and my embarrassing mother. She was usually sweating through her silk, on a break from “busting some moves.”  So many times, she’d scold me saying, “No one will ask you to dance if you sit in a corner and sulk.”

I’m sitting in a corner of an office, in a corner of Ahmedabad realizing how true this is of every dancefloor. Life. Work. School.  Whether or not we like the song or the dancers, it’s so much more fun to dance. 

My mother also says that having fun is an art, a skill. You have to know how. I guess the first step is putting down these burdens and stepping onto the dancefloor.

Well here goes… = )

I met Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad straddles the Sabarmati River. The west bank is the New City, with shopping malls and multiplexes and wide highways, avenues and parks. It feels more like New Jersey than any city I know, which may explain Gujaratis’ predeliction for settling in the Jerz…but I digress. The east bank, the Old City, is the historic heart of Ahmedabad. Nowadays, most of the economic development happens in New City. The east bank, Old City, is the rusted industrial core of Ahmedabad, a ghost city.

This past weekend, I went on the Heritage Walk, a two-hour walking tour of Old City. Beautiful. Profound.

The walk takes you through pols, a network of over 300 self-contained microneighborhoods that are interconnected. Pols are a feature of A’bad urban planning that go back to the 1700s. The neighborhoods are organized by trades or extended families (often the same). Over the years, pols have facilitated communal violence because all of members of a particular religious group live in a distinct community, and everyone else lives around them.

There are gorgeous architectural details in these pols, but beyond those features is the rhythm of life in the pols. I always admire New York for being infinite – the city has a magic that comes from the multitudes of lives, of experiences, of New Yorks that exist in the smallest space. Take one city block. Now consider the number of separate experiences of the city that exist in that block. Now think of the pols. How many Ahmedabads could exist in a single pol?

I also loved that neighbors city outside in the squares talking about how the neighborhood is going to shit. And, it’s walkable. Amazing. Pols are entire secret city within the city.

Swaminarayan Mandir, Kalupur

Pols remind me of my grandparents’ Chali-apartments in Kolkata. All the doors are open and the neighbors spill into halls at all hours, scolding other peoples children for misdemeanors. And bird-sized cockroaches roam the hall. I felt at home for the first time in a long time.

Next Steps

It might be early to be thinking about next steps, but this is a 10-month fellowship with no grad school or job waiting for me when I get back.  Application season is…now.

For over a year now, I’ve been actively nourishing the idea of becoming an engineer.  Sure I’ve worked on the policy side of affordable housing, but wouldn’t it be cool if I could just build an affordable house? Then people could afford to buy it. I would make money and they would have a house. It’s mutally beneficial. It’s win-win.

But it involves going back to school to take all the math I avoided in college. Plus some chemsitry and physics. Gross. Also, I can hear Ms Mavro laughing at me from somewhere near Ms Martin’s house.

Any thoughts?

Ahmedabad Events

Cultural Events

Heritage Week