A Stony Elegance

Sorry for the silence guys, I don’t know where the last few weeks have gone (and I've had some trouble uploading a posting with a video - that's on hold for now). Let me just jump feet first into something that I’ve been wondering these last few weeks. I’ve been thinking about elegance. These thoughts were actually inspired by the state of my feet, so not exactly the most elegant starting point but if you bear with me, there is some elegance in the end.

A few weeks back I bought thee very lovely Kolaphuri sandals. They’re lovely to wear but Ahmedabad is one dusty place and after a day walking around my feet have been getting quite dusty and dirty. I’ve been coming back to our flat (yes, I’ve moved out of my bosses’ lovely Jupiter pad and into a 10th floor room with a view – more about the view another time) and spending a good 5 or 10 minutes trying to get my feet clean. But really it has felt like I was fighting a losing battle – no matter how much I would soap and rub, and rub and soap they would still look a little off colour.

Then one day a couple of weeks ago Avni suggested a pumice stone (you know the type? A stone with bubbles inside…think funny shaped, sand-coloured Wispa bar if you are in the UK). She said it would be really handy in bringing back the sparkle to my feet again.

Since then I’ve been popping into all kinds of little stores and huts and shacks , but I have not found anything that resembles this simple piece of stone. I couldn’t understand why it would be so difficult to find a stone until the other day when I was enlightened by a store owner just near our apartment.

I had gone into to the little store which sells beauty products and underwear, as I’d been told that this would be the best kind of store to look in and I asked if they sold pumice stone. The owner looked pleased in the way that only shop owners can when they know that they’ve got exactly what you’re looking for. I beamed him a smile in return and my feet breathed a sigh of relief! He finished up with his other customer and then pulled out a tray of items for me.

Actually, what he pulled out was a tray of bars of blocks of something that looked hard that were in a variety of colours from a bright orange to a deeply intense blue. I took a look at one of the bars and it seemed reasonably interesting. There was even a little rope attached which I guess you could use to hang it up from or twirl it around your finger as you while away your hours in the bathroom. I asked if I could take one of the bars out if it’s plastic wrapping and have a closer look. The shop keeper looked a little surprised but said fine.

Opening it up I saw that one side was flat and on the other, little grooves had been etched into the surface. As I turned the bar over in my hands and I realised that it was made of up of tiny bits of stone that had the look coloured crystals. I rubbed the bar against my palm and as I did so a few crumbs of the compacted, crystallised stone came off. I rubbed a little harder and some more came off.

My face fell as I realised that these bits of crystaline stone were being held together by some kind of glue.

I asked the owner if he just had the simple puthro. You know, the kind that you use for scrubbing feet.

He said no.

I umm’ed. I ah’ed. ‘Kya thi marse?’

Oh, no you won’t find those stones anywhere. Buy one of these. They’re very attractive, no?

Well, yes the colours are interesting but I don’t think they are going to work very well. Do you ever get just the stones?

No, no, not really. Those stones are old. People always want something new. Try this, it’s the latest and will look very nice in your bathroom....

So, I left and went for a walk with feet that were still in need of a good hard scrub. As I walked around and forgot about my feet, I began thinking about how wonderful it is that somehow some stones are formed, which seem to fit rather neatly into the palms of human hands, can actually happen to do a pretty good job of helping you scrub the Ahmedabadi grime from your feet.

The very fact that these bubbly stones (which, I have since discovered, are formed after volcanic eruptions) come into existence at all seemed to be an amazing demonstration of elegance compared to the clumsy attempt of some manufacturer to….

‘Ah, just walk back to your cave, you dirty footed Luddite. Those old bits of crusty volcano don’t come in the perfect colour to match the awesome design that we made up for our bathroom, do they?’

Twirling in the street

I said I would post some pictures. Here's a nice clear image for you to get started with...

...it was taken about two weeks ago in a street just near where I live. This was during Navratri - which is a uniquely Gujarati religious celebration which involves lots of dancing, and the dancing involves lots of people twirling around in circles, with some basic or not so basic steps. I guess a kind of guju Ceilidh.

I took the picture whilst sitting on the side of a normally busy road which was closed off in the evenings during the nine nights.

I really tried to make the most of the 9 nights; there were loads of different venues and I sensed different atmostpheres in each and noticed different responses in myself to these atmospheres.

The picture is from a garba that was being held just on the street side by a small township that has grown up in the space between three main roads. It was similar in flavour to the nights I was in Vastrapur and Thaltej - two villages that have been absorbed into Ahmedabad city. On all three nights it was very localised communities who had gathered together in the biggest open space available near their various homes to celebrate mataji (divine mother). In the first, it was a street that was appropriated for the nights and a tape player hooked up to an loudspeaker shouted out garba tunes; in Vastrapur the village square was dressed up and used as the venue for the thousand or so vilagers. And in a tight gully in Thaltej village, 20 of us danced for 2 hours around 3 young lads beating out a rhythm with their drums; the night was finished off by a snack of gathia and chai for all at 2am.

In all three of these places, the steps that women and men were dancing were quite simple; enough that even a novice or a young kid could join in. There were no 'tickets' to get and we danced on the dusty, spat-upon and uneven floors for all the world to come see (if they so cared).

These nights were quite different from two other nights that I experienced. Both of these other nights were ticketed events. People had gathered together from various communities and parts of Ahmedabad and were there, I guess not so much because of where they lived but who they were, or perhaps, who they were connected to.

One night I was invited to a dance at the National Institute of Design (NID) - the most highly regarded design school in the country. Here I was introduced to a twelve-step and to a 14-step garba on a large lawn in the leafy campus right by the Sabarmati river which bisects Ahmedabad. The steps being performed were a bit more complicated than the simple steps that I had known before.

Because the tempo started off slow and there were some willing guides, I slowly manage to get the hang of the twelve-step and had a quite unbelievable 45 minutes of twirling around in one of a series of concentric rings with perhaps 400 fashionable, mobile and up and coming Indians all spinning, circling and clapping to the three beats together with the same 12 step rhythm. After the tempo had risen to a delerious crescendo and then stopped, I stood still and realised that I had absolutely no sense of space, time and self.

Another ticketed night I went 30 minutes drive out of town to a 'party plot' and danced on a lush, cool green lawn with car-owning youngsters from all over the city. There was a huge band up on stage and specially invited professional dancers. That night the pattern was different with little sub-groups formed. In the group who invited us, people seemed to take turns to 'propose' a step to follow and quickly others in the group would follow the step; and then within a few moments someone else would propose some other variation or different step. I found the experience irritating and found after a while that I was making rather nasty and uninformed judgements about the people who kept confusing and throwing me with their continual innovating. In contrast to my experience at NID, I was quite conscious of space, time and self and extremely aware of the others around me.

I experienced this constant reinvitenting style and and my own angry judgementalism on another night. This time the dancing was on the ground floor space at the bottom of a block of some quite plush apartments in the posh part of town where I was staying at the time. Many apartment blocks here are set up as societies and quite a few of these will organise their own navratri celebrations with only those who live in the compound of the apartment and their guests invited. There was a mix of age ranges present here as people from the whole block had made their way to the ground floor; those who were dancing were the younger people and whilst I was encourged to join in by the elders I didn't feel the same invitation from those who were dancing. The youngsters carried on dancing in their small group and after making some efforts at joining in the circle I quietly slopped away after five minutes, feeling hurt and angered by these well-to-do but unwelcoming bunch of kids. As I listened to the music from my open window and drifted off to sleep, I was unable to comprehend where my angered judgements about the group came from and felt utterly alienated from the world and myself.


I don't quite know how to finish this blog; indeed my feelings about those nine days are just as clear as the picture at the top of the page, so I'll just leave it up to you to notice who you decide to dance with.

yours twirling,
rupesh

A difference that makes a difference

Where do you sit down to eat your breakfast, lunch and dinner? I guess it’s not something that you spend a lot of timing thinking about. At the risk of suggesting that I’ve got too much time on my hands over here, it is something that I have been thinking about a little bit in the last few days.

On one of my first days here I went to one of the Education Community Video Units that we’re setting up on the other side of town in Ahmedabad. The unit is housed with a local organisation called Sahyog and is based in a part of town where a large and, from my understanding, quite marginalised Muslim population lives. The area along with many other parts of Gujarat was affected and involved in some quite violent events in 2002. Some of the words used to describe these events include communal violence, riots, disturbances...(see here for some more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence)

Anyway, back to my third or fourth day here. I was taken to the Sahyog project office so that I could see some of what we were doing. There I met 12 people who we were (and still are) in the process of learning how to produce educational videos. We spent some time doing cha-cha (no, I didn’t get my dancing shoes out...cha-cha is Gujarati slang for ‘having discussions ’ or some chit-chat…) and then my manager left. I asked if I could stick around and spend the rest of the day with the team.

Well, soon enough lunch time came around but unfortunately I had not packed any sandwiches in my suitcase, let alone got myself a lunchbox (Paddington would not have been proud...And while we’re on the subject of little brown bears from Peru, can we start an ‘outraged-of-suburbia-campaign’ against the adverts showing Paddington eating Marmite. Forget the war in Iraq or battling climate change...its time we stood up for our rights to undisturbed childhood memories).

Sorry, I’m drifting; I was worrying about my lack of sandwiches, right?

...so, I was told very gently not to worry and invited to sit down on the floor in one of the rooms. Some producers were already sat down and others drifted in holding plastic tubs, small metal containers, parcels wrapped up in newspaper. Within a few moments there was a cornucopia (I’ve always wanted to use that word) of sabzi, roti, chawal and dhal inside our circle. And lots of cha-cha. People began digging into their food and then digging into their neighbour’s food. Tubs of bhindi-sabzi and bengan-sabzi got passed around. More cha-cha. Rotis were torn up and rice was scooped.

Since that introduction to how to share food, my days of walking down to the sandwich shop and coming back to my desk and hearing the scratching cha-cha of yet another cellophane wrapped sandwich triangle being opened feel quite far away.

Last night I got back from a day at another of our project sites and had another unusual eating experience. This one is in an area called, a journey of some two-and-a-half hours from Ahmedabad much of which is on National Expressway 1 (the building of this expressway has apparently earned the ruling and Hindu dominated BJP party in Gujarat lots plaudits and votes…mainly from the mobile middle-classes like me, not displaced rural villagers and bisected communities of tribes-people). It was a dusty journey and I came back to the place where I am house-sitting temporarily. Anyway, there’s a guy, Arun, who cooks and cleans from at this house and he’s at my service while I’m there. But we had dinner together rather than separately as would be the customary way between ‘master’ and ‘servant’.

Since day one I’ve struggled with this form of relationship. I’ve recalled moments of going back to Nairobi when I didn’t know how to be in this servant-master interaction. But instead of worrying too much about it all right now, I’ve been experimenting with my behaviour a little.

The other day I asked the dhobi-walla what his name was; I know – it’s not revolutionary - but it did feel like a reasonable success and every morning we have a little cha-cha now before I hand him my clothes that need cleaning and ironing.

I repeated that experiment by asking the woman who collects kachra every morning…this experiment met with considerably less success…she started raging at me about why the hell she ought to tell me her name and now I just divert my eyes when i put my rubbish out, somewhat ashamed of my insensitivity and highly alarmed at the depth of my very pathetic middle-class, liberal, European guilt.

Anyway, a few evenings ago, I got back from work late and Arun was making dinner. He told me that my dinner was ready; the table in the dinning room was set out for one with a ceramic plate and bowl, with sabzi, roti and chawal. I wandered into the kitchen to get some water and noticed that Arun had set out his own dinner as well, although this was on the floor in a metal thali. I asked him if I could join him and after a little puzzled look he said sure…he moved to get up and come out to the dinning room and I asked if I could sit in the kitchen with him. I think I saw him beam a smile and I sat down with him.

Arun and I have had dinner together the last few nights and yesterday I took his suggestion that we eat in front of the TV watching Hindi films songs. Unfortunately, I’ll be eating out tonight as the gas cylinder has run out at home (there is a major undersupply of gas cylinders in Ahmedabad; for some quite obscure reason the state government wants to avoid too many people cooking dinner and so has restricted the supply!)

I feel like I’m in danger of glorifying communal eating, like I’m saying that it really is more fun together. Actually, I can envisage some point in the future when I might quite like to sit down with my own food and my own thoughts at lunch time.

But what I have noticed is that our daily patterns contain and embody so many of our hidden assumptions about what we do in our lives, how we do them and why, about what we think is important and what we think is less important. I’ve realised that sometimes it can be insightful (or at least amusing) to make a change to these patterns.

So how about a little experiment...how about you change the way you sit down to eat in the next day or so? If you’re used to sitting on the side of the table that’s closer to the kitchen, how about asking your partner to swap places with you, or if you’re having your solitary sandwich in silence how about wheeling your chair over to your work colleague and ask for a bite of theirs. Or perhaps as a couple you always eat your dinner together chatting animatedly about the days events…maybe you could eat your meal separately, silently in two different rooms at the same time. Light some candles for a boring mid-week dinner with the kids. Or send out official invites for the mad Monday morning breakfast. Try something and see what happens…

Speak soon
rupesh

ps I'll post some photos soon so you won't have to put a scheduled hour in the diary to go through my blog!

Ashes to ashes

Hey there. Sorry for the silence.

I’ve just come back to Ahemdabad after running an eight day workshop with 50 people from four communities in Gujarat. We’re working to set up four local video units with these individuals, with the aim that each of these units would become capable of producing educational videos for use in local schools by the end of the 18 months timeframe.

There’s lots more that I can tell you on that front – stuff about the role of community-owned media, questions about how to improve teaching on core subjects like maths, science and so on through local stories and how kids in rural and urban parts of Gujarat that have and continue to be affected by religious, gender and caste problems. But rather than filling you up with all that, I thought I tell you a story about the system for washing up plates at the training centre where we were staying.

Dalit Shakti Kendra is a training centre with a difference. Its not your normal corporate hospitality joint with anonymous rooms and even more anonymous sessions. The centre was set up by a local organisation for Dalits – also known as Untouchables. The caste system determines that certain occupations are ‘reserved’ for certain groups in society. For Dalits, these are occupations from toilet cleaning, removal of dead bodies and animals from streets to sewage clearing. Its general means cleaning up after everyone else who’s higher up the caste ladder has finished making their mess. Some of you will know the sophistication of the caste system is such that even within the untouchable caste there’s a more-or-less official a pecking order!

Anyway, the training centre was set up in order to enable Dalits to break out of their traditional occupations by providing them with training and support in alternative livelihoods (Shakti means power in Hindi).

On our first day at the centre I was finishing my lunch and saw that everyone was going outside with their empty plates. Some of the others who I was with had gathered around a small table with their large metal thalis. I walked over and saw them gathering some grey powder and putting it into their dirty plates.

The use of ash as a cleaning agent is quite common across rural India and at DSK the process starts with how the food is prepared. Huge pots and pans (I’m talking vats big enough to get seriously lost in) are used to prepare the curry, rice and dhal for the people at the training centre. Local wood is used for the cooking fires. And the resulting ash is collected in small metal basins and placed on a small table outside.

After we’d had our dinner we took our greasy plates over to the washing up centre, dropped a couple of handfuls of ash into dirty thali and scrubbed out the grease with it. After this there are a series of five basins one filled with plain water for rinsing, a second filled with water with a very small amount of soap and two more for rinsing. Once we’d soaked up the grease we got rid of the ash and then dipped our way through the four basins and with a bit of elbow grease. What we each ended up with was a clean plate ready for drying. After returning the clean plates to the dinning hall, magically there are four hundred plates ready for the next meal.

I found the system interesting from an environmental point of view; with hundreds of people to cater for each dirty plate ends up using a very limited amount of water and instead of non-renewable chemical soaps and detergents it uses the by products of the fuel.

But what I found even more fascinating is the underlying questions about our ways of living together that it raised. The design seemed to be asking me about whether oppressions are perpetuated by what we do or by how we do them. There is an argument that because plates need to be washed its better to pay someone to do that for you and therefore create a job for them. But I wonder, is the situation quite different in a society where certain groups are trapped in these types of role because of the existing social norms and structures? How similar is this argument become to saying that it is okay kill someone because it creates a job for a grave digger?


rupesh

amusing you?

Hello. How are you? Where are you?

I am sat here under a whirring fan on the 6th floor of “Jupiter Towers” in the Bodakdev/Vastapur part of Ahmedabad. It’s a humid evening and my fingers are working slowly. It’s actually not that late in the day about 9.30pm but I’ve been travelling and I feel a little drowsy.

My drowsy mind keeps asking me a question…How do I start a blog? (there’s a bigger one there as well…how do you I keep a good blog?). But to start…I guess the first thing is with a welcome.

So hello and namaste. Please take your shoes off on the way in. Just leave them there by the door. Yes, just there. That’s great. Thanks. I trust you will stay as long as you need to and I hope that I can write as much as needs to be written.

Where to start now? I’ll try to start near the beginning...

I was welcomed to India with a pleasing surprise – bhindi noo shak (okra curry) was my first meal here in Jupiter Towers. It was pleasing because it was also what my mum cooked for dinner last night in rainy Watford. After lunch I then went over to the offices where I’ll be working, had a little wonder around the streets and then came back here for dinner. I then went out and had a coffee and….

…wait now; you didn’t sign up to hear about what I had for dinner. You were expecting tales of the unexpected, right? Perhaps I would tell you something significant, something important, a revealing idea, something revolutionary or even something a little revolting.

You were expecting blood, and guts and tears and…well anything but what I had for dinner. And didn’t I know it. As I went about the town, there was this extra voice in my head wondering about whether each incident might be worthy of blogging…And frankly there wasn’t all that much that did feel worthwhile

And so a few moments ago when I opened up this computer, I felt like an amateur Marco Polo, shuffling his feet in front of his royal audience holding nothing more than a meagre box of a-not-very-unusual spice from the local corner shop. I was hoping that the royal audience will send me off travelling again to look for something more exciting rather than send me off minus my little head.

So, dear virtual kings and queens, rather than risk this fate I’ve decided that I’m not going to try to amuse you. Instead I’m going to go about amusing myself (easy tiger) ...and if I get caught by something and this something wants to be told, then I’ll come here and I'll share that with you. What do you think? Do you think it might work better than 9 months of ‘what I had for dinner today’?

Night, night.

rupesh