NMS

I am not a Bombayite, Mumbaiker, or whatever. In fact, being half-Punjabi seems like the very antithesis of Bombay. But then, I guess this city of migrants attracts the hearts of a wide variety of people. So while I will leave this place in a couple of months, I do love it, or the idea of it: cosmopolitan, civilised, heterogeneous, culturally deep. And pragmatic -- business is business, let's get on with things.

This is why I'm getting more and more upset at the NMS and that bastard Raj Thackeray. So his goons terrorise North Indians, scare them away and create an immense labour shortage in industrial enterprises in Maharashtra. But then is that filled by Marathi speakers? Oh no, because Maharashtrians don't want the work that was taken up by workers from UP and Bihar. People are scared, machines are quiet, everyone's losing money and for what? So that this upstart can try and consolidate a vote-bank left over from the days of Shiv Sena?

Delhi autumn, Bombay spring / catching up

More soon? Ha! By my reckoning, it's been almost two months since my last post, in Madras. So at least half of this one is going to be about catchup, and then perhaps a little on the state of play here.

Dec. 5th - 18th: Delhi

I returned from Madras to find a much colder city. Flying in from sticky semi-tropical warmth to the crispness that I normally associate with winter in this part of the world was welcome -- the feel of Christmas in the air, the need to bundle up and sleep under various quilts and blankets, the frigid unpleasantlness of morning showers. It all reminded me of the seasons changing in the ways I was used to from childhood, in Islamabad, all those years ago. Along with the seasons changing, I was getting a bit burnt out -- not had much of a break since I started in September. But I felt happy to be back, and spent time with friends and conducted a handful of interviews in those two weeks -- all was relatively good.

Dec. 18th-Jan. 7th: Islamabad

Back 'home' for Christmas -- glad to see my folks and get away from work, but it is always difficult for me to go to that city. I have a whole lot of childhood hurt that is normally wrapped up in the closet in my old room... much easier to deal with thousands of miles away than a few feet. And there are few indications of how I've gown from that place, very few friends. Most of my friends will have heard me gripe on and on about it over the years, so I'm not going to belabour the point.

Of course, being in Islamabad over the winter meant tragedy on a grand scale: the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. I've blogged on this elsewhere, so if you're interested (still, 6 weeks later), I'll send you the link.

Jan 8th - Jan. 24th: Delhi, Chandigarh / Ludhiana, Guwahati

I got back from Islamabad stressed out because of the intense politics of the last few days and the state of virtual house arrest when the country was on strike, and other Islamabad business. I arrived that week and after coming to the conclusion that I wouldn't get anything done in Delhi, I headed to Punjab for a three day trip: quite successful, getting six interviews and getting to see the country driving to Ludhiana (really reminded me of trips out of Lahore), and look around Le Corbousier's masterpieces in Chandigarh. I got back and then a few days later headed toward a conference in Guwahati in Assam, which was one of the most surreal experiences in fieldwork. Again, I don't have the energy to go over it, so I'm going to be lazy and link to my friend Paul's blog post.

So after Assam, I went around wrapping up my Delhi life and saying goodbye to friends, which didn't turn out as smoothly as I had originally hoped: I got sick a couple of days before I was scheduled to leave the city, which led to all sorts of nasty and embarassing incidents while saying goodbye to people.

Delhi is a city that I've learned to appreciate, even like. I've made good friends and I've learned how to live and have fun and do work there. I know that Delhi is one of those cities to which I will return over and over again, and I feel good about that. It has its annoyances and its difficulties, and isn't the most sophisticated of towns. But my vision of Delhi is of coffee and drinks in the gathering gloom, walks in the evenings in Lodhi gardens, or the morning light at Hauz Khas tank. That will stay with me.

Jan. 24th - present

BOMBAY!!! I flew here and then stayed for a week with my friend Bart in a friend's beautiful old filmy apartment facing the Arabian Sea in Bandra. It's an apartment I stayed in for a month two years ago, doing predissertation fieldwork, and it's such a beautiful place, such a beautiful start to a stay in Bombay. And that apartment above the Bandra Bandstand was the site of many adventures, including going to a real-life Bollywood studio, and recovering from sickness and depression -- caused in the main by giardia.

Since then, I've moved into yet another PG on Shirley Rajan Road, also in Bandra on the foot of Pali Hill and parallel to the Carter Road Seaface. I've started work -- conducting interviews in pharma and textiles, started slowly making friends and getting settled in this amazing and deeply flawed city.

I have a lot more to say about Bombay -- a city that touches my soul a great deal more than Delhi -- and about where I am in terms of wrapping up fieldwork, but that needs to wait until another day. But I hope to pay more attention to this blog, as it does help me make sense of this thing. I hope you're going to tune in!

Goodbye Madras!

So much for good intentions... I'm leaving the Madras University guest house whereat I've been staying for the last two weeks en route to the Aeroport, and still not a blog post on this new city! Well, I have about 45 minutes until the taxi arrives, so I thought I'd write some quick observations while my laptop's recharging.

People say Chennai is like a series of large-ish towns glommed together to make up a metropolis only in terms of scale, rather than the new urban culture that characterises Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, and perhaps Calcutta once upon a time. I don't think that's wrong. It's ironic that the most urban Indian state demographically seems to have the culture of the provincial town.

Provincial usually has derogatory connotations, but in this case, it's descriptive and politically meaningful. The Dravidian movement, on which my colleague Matt is writing his dissertation, first created itself against the cultural hegemony of the North represented by the Congress and other 'national' movements. This cultural resurgence of Tamil identity turned political in the post-Independence years, with Congress being beaten in Tamil Nadu by the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (sp?). DMK and its splinter, the All-India (Anna) DMK, have been in power ever since. There's also a deep connection between politics and Tamil film: ever since MG Ramaswamy -- the great movie star MGR -- became Chief Minister. Film 'heroes' can portray the ideal Tamil, and this symbolism leads to leadership. It's certainly more powerful in that sense than Bollywood.

There are darker sides to this identity, including vicious anti-Brahmin sentiment where Brahminical privilege isn't nearly as powerful as it is up North. It's also led to the greatest level of 'reservations' (affirmative action) in any state in India. Far from removing caste, Tamil politics has solidified it.

To get back to the city and my experiences, though, I haven't felt as much an outsider anywhere else I've been in India... which admittedly comprises of mostly metro - urban experience. A friend living here said that he found this initially annoying but has come to appreciate how culturally unified the city and state are. I don't think this was possible in two and a half weeks.

And yet, I've had some fantastic interviews here, just fantastic... I lost my audio recorder and have really wished that I had it back, which is not the case for most of my interviews. I find the upper classes wonderfully reflective, and that contributes to it. For all I know, the lower classes might be more reflective -- certainly there are high levels of literacy here -- but I don't speak Tamil and have gotten more angry at rickshaw drivers than anywhere else.

The city itself is sort of enclosed and polluted, but with some lovely spots. I find that I'm not much of a beach person, although these are some of the nicest beaches I've seen in India. The country around is very green but doesn't have a deeply tropical look to it, except for the odd clump of palm trees. On the other hand, there is not much to do here. And less connected -- I couldn't find a simple Olympus DS-2... though that might just be India in general.

Most of my stay has been coloured by the fact that I don't know many people here. Most evenings have been spent inside the guesthouse, on the internet. It's the worst part of fieldwork, this isolation, and it's been staved off in Delhi by friends and acquaintances, and a pretty exciting vibe, with all of its problems. It's going to be more of a feature in the Spring, based in Bombay but taking many more of these trips, so we'll see how that is.

One big exception was an overnight trip I took with Faisal to Mahaballipuram and Pondicherry, which was fantastic. Both are laid-back seaside towns with a lot to see. It was just great to have long discussions on epistemology (what else?) while staring out at the Bay of Bengal.

This part of the country seems to me, a non-Tamil, as a place to lose yourself. There certainly is that vibe here: many of the great spiritual reformist movements and figures ended up here: the Theosophical Society, Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekenanda. I guess I hold on to myself pretty tightly, and that's why I'm more affirmed by places with materialist coherence like Bombay and Delhi. But who knows? Perhaps you'll find me in ten years living in a hut on the beach somewhere off the East Coast highway, watching the sun rise over the Bay of Bengal and pondering the mysteries of the infinite. Right now, though, I've got industry to study.

So, New Delhi at midnight, home and asleep by two am, I hope... and then just two weeks until Christmas break!

More soon.

Distance Away from 'the City of Djinns'

First. apologies to anyone regularly checking this blog (though I can't imagine there are many, some how?). I think the thing with fieldwork is that after a certain point, motivation to do anything but the daily grind slowly leaks away. Thus the frontier paper, which I was happily and confidently revising, is now languishing in my hard drive, this blog hasn't been posted in for almost a month, nor has www.passtheroti.com... thinking about it, I definitely need a vacation of some sort. Going to Islamabad in less than a month, so that'll be it.

The hidden cost of shorter and shorter time in research is that every day spent in the fieldwork site must mean something. If you're away for two years, you can build roots in a place (typically one), and if you get two or three things done a week, that's fine.

Relatedly, I'm almost finished reading William Dalrymple's first book, 'City of Djinns', which has a soothing quality to it -- I like it more than I expected. But part of that calmness is how his historical sketches of Delhi City are interlaced with sustained encounters with assorted characters (interviewees) in the Old City and descriptions of the trials and delights of daily life experienced by him and his wife during their year living there. I find it unsurprising that Dalymple and his family now divide their time between England and India -- they have established ties here, a niche that, while elitist and founded on success in Western writing and publishing, is as real as any South Delhi Punjabi emigre elite. The basis of this niche is the open-ended curiosity of archetypical outsiders: a Scotch couple with little knowledge of Hindi (initially) but with amazingly good connections, and with naught to do but explore, talk to people, read, write, paint. I don't mean any of this as a criticism: this open-endedness allowed him to write a book that is both evocative and interesting. It's not academic history or cultural critique, nor should it be. To my sensibilities, admittedly more than a little English, it's a wonderfully crafted narrative of a person's experiences in a city over a year, over-laid onto a folk historiography of nostalgia and decline.

Mini-book review aside, the point I wanted to make is this: it's interesting to contrast Dalrymple's year in India at 25, in 1991, to mine at 27, in 2007. The occasional complaint Dalyrmple has in his narrative of the faster pace and the crass commercialism of South Delhi is now a dominant pace of the city -- reading the book, everything from his housing situation to his transportation has a quaint air to it. Life in Delhi, and in any metropolis in the country, has a cut-throat commercialised feeling to it. I argue with auto rickshaw-wallahs about fares several times a day, I'm staying in a PG room for probably four times as much as William and Olivia paid for a barsati, and roads are getting more and more choked with traffic. This is not surpising -- liberalisation occurred in the same year as Dalyrmple's research, and Delhi-wallahs are getting richer and richer.

Consider what he was and I am researching. His book is about Delhi's history, from the Tughluks to the Moguls to the British to the Partition and the riots of 1984, along with other more meandering topics from eunuchs and the Anglo-Indians to sufi saints. Together, these form an air of nostalgia as the grandeur and sophistication are undone by the quotidian nature of thepresent Indian state (I told you it was elitist). His researches are almost always accompanied by learned and personable characters who enliven history and narrative and serve as translators between dense culture or archeology and the reader. I am, by contrast, studying manufacturing in the industrial areas and districts of Indian urban and peri-urban space. There is little beauty and nostalgia for me comes from old ideas (say, that of industrialisation) rather than old civility. And there isn't any kind, wise old gentleman, like Dr. Jaffrey, to show me the way.

Lastly, and most importantly, look at differences in personal life. Dalymple was accompanied by his partner. I have no partner. He spent a year in Delhi, traveling to Ajmer and Shimla and the Maharashtrian hinterland but essentially living in one place. I am going to be based in two of the major metros and will travel out a fair bit from them.

Dalrymple's year in India produced a highly successful travel book that I like despite all its faults. My eight months will, I hope, eventually lead to a book, but I can guarantee you it will be less successful by all accounts. I'm certainly engaged in a different project: my eventual audience will be academic, and I will in the end live or die by theoretical contributions rather than readability or attention to detail. As a result, I need to keep variation going, I need to treat interviews as data collected rather than interesting stories. Ultimately, this is an eight-month long research assignment -- I got research grants on the strength of fairly specific activities, and while there is no oversight what-so-ever, I still feel like I'm here for a job. I don't know how Dalrymple funded his year, but it would've been a) a great deal cheaper, and b) infinitely more flexible.

And yet, I guess I miss the world, now gone, in which fieldwork meant both living and working, and most importantly being stable enough to start enjoying yourself as who you are in this weird context, rather than treating it as a means to professional ends.

Research is hard. Harder still when you're on a two and a half week trip to Madras, a place where you know hardly anyone and can't speak the language at all. If there's a point at all in this rambling self-pitying stram of verbiage above, it's to bemoan the leisure of soaking up life in a new place with people you love, and have work that complements that soaking. 'Sukha' actually means dry in Hindi / Urdu, and I'm afraid that life is getting a little too dry and brittle at the moment. I hope good interviews tomorrow will alleviate that a little.

I'll write a more traditional 'Madras splendour ' tomorrow or the next day, I promise -- idli and coconut chutney, the beach and the ever-present lungi, the beach and the suburban rail system... 10ish more days here, and then I return to late autumnal Delhi, 'the City of Djinns', for three weeks.

A thousand bangs and flashes

(This was originally written Nov. 12th, but somehow forgot to post it then... so hoping to keep posts at the two week mark -- sounds reasonable, na?)

A lot's been happening in the last few days, it's sort of hard to keep track.

Musharraf declared a State of Emergency in Pakistan, things are calm and parents are fine, watching US sitcoms on DVD. I've written quite a bit of political commentary on a community blog here (www.passtheroti.com) so I won't retread except to say that I'm worried less about the event itself than the violent internal politics that ostensibly caused it.

I went to the student elections at Jawaharlal Nehru University student elections, which are a *big deal*, though also interestingly untied to the balance of national politics. The Students' Federation of India -- associated with the Communist Party of India-Marxist -- were unseated by the All-India Students' Association, part of the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist. How's that for anti-incumbancy?


Diwali brought work to a halt last week, as the city started looking more and more like a festive war-zone, with bombs and missiles and gunpowder smoke saturating the air. And between all these festivities, I had an excellent time: hanging out with new-found researcher friends, going to art exhibitions and meeting random writers who have booker prize winners on speed-dial.

Diwali crackers sound like bombs

...honestly, these scare me half to death and they increase in scale and intensity as the Festival of Lights nears. And the industrialists have started to push meetings off until after Diwali, etc. I suppose shouldn't be such a scrooge about it, but well-heeled Delhi-ites throwing a huge week-long bash for themselves is not particularly to my taste. No doubt more Diwali stuff to follow.

Work continues, pushing out further and further into the edges of the National Capital Region. Lots of rickshaw rides and dust, lots of textile businesses doing OK but honestly wishing they were in China. There was an auto part factory that had the japanese terms in roman script for 'efficiency', 'motivation'. It was Toyotism taken out of Japan, transplanted and then systematically ignored. The Sensex (Bombay stock exchange) hit 20,000 for the first time, having doubled in only 10 months, and yet I only see India Shining on the surface. Actually that's the story I'm probably going to have to tell in my dissertation.

I was sitting drinking coffee in this cafe and NDTV shows up and starts making a report on this particular place, complete with two internet startup guys who are regular customers. I'm probably in different shots, but I guess a guy sitting by himself surrounded by work was not exactly cool enough to be featured. Oh well.

I think my ship's about to come in! Apparently my Fulbright-Hays clearance is reaching its final stages, whatever that means. I'll keep you posted.

It's getting colder, especially at night -- I need to buy a jacket. Other than that, things are pretty much OK. Am about to buy a piece of art, go out and relax for the evening. Probably smoke some sheesha -- you know how it is.

More soon.

Where I go

Part of this job gets me out and about the city quite a bit -- particularly last week, when I passed state lines into Uttar Pradesh three times (to Noida and Ghaziabad) and once to Haryana (Faridabad). Delhi is expanding in all directions, but the satellite cities are way far out, but that is where a lot of the industry is located. This week saw interviews with more guys who have their offices near their factories, so a touch more of real life than usual in non-discript office buildings.

On a memorable occasion in which I figured out that a guy's office was actually across the border in South Ghaziabad (if you want to know where these places are, maps.google.com is your friend), I took an autorickshaw as far as the border, a cycle rickshaw to a well-known (to them) restaurant and the back of a scooter to this place, and the same in reverse. I can tell you that far eastern Delhi is quite pretty: eucalyptus groves and empty space punctuated by industrial zones, new housing complexes and ridiculous malls that stand out like mesas. In another direction, along the famous Grand Trunk Road to the northeast, crossing the border meant clambering into a tempo with 15 labourers and a lot of baggage. And they were sweet enough to forgo the Rs. 3 charge for traveling 1.5 kms because they couldn't break a 50.

I don't know where I'm going with this, except to say that this is where the Indian economy is, not in the glitzy malls and call centres of 'India Shining'. Most of where I went was not shining, but it was alive. Today's interview took me to a small garments factory on the top of a small building in an alley of Paharganj, which Delhi-wallas would know as the grungy area where backpackers stay near the New Delhi Train Station... goats, dogs, bullocks, cycle rickshaws and mounds of al sorts create an obstacle course, the house is rusted and basic, the factory is not larger than an apartment. And yet 29 people are employed there, there are lives being lived and at least some wages being earned. It felt solid and real, if shabby (sha'abi), not like the platitudes of Incredible India...