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!
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Sunday, October 14, 2007
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
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
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