Ahmedabad - Day 1

Friday 8/11/2006 6:12 PM

I arrived in Ahmedabad early this morning. The train ride passed without incident and to everyone’s surprise, the train arrived at Ahmedabad only a half hour late. I think most of us passengers were mentally prepared for a long stopover at Surat or one of these places where the monsoons are wreaking havoc. However, luckily for me that wasn’t to be. Another incident free auto rickshaw ride brought me to my base for the next few weeks: the Janvikas office. Everyone I met were surprised that a) my train was able to enter Ahmedabad considering the rains b) I found the Janvikas office or rather my auto rickshaw driver knew where it was and I had to offer no special instructions whatsoever to him. Apparently, the incidents of people losing their way and going around in circles trying to find the office are legendary.

I’ve spent the day mostly listening, reading and then reading some more. My schedule in Gujarat has more or less been finalized. A week staying in Kuttch, a week staying in Panchmahal (a village district in Gujarat which was one of the most severely affected by the communal riots) and 2 other visits to youth livelihood programmes being conducted in Ahmedabad. I will get the opportunity to see for myself what grass roots development is all about. I am particularly looking forward to my stay in Kuttch. All the staff here are waxing eloquent about its beauty: the desert, the mountains, the fields, the people.

The staff here is simply great. Friendly, never too busy to answer yet another unending question, always a smile. To be honest, I initially found it faintly irritating: why are these people always smiling and well…why are they so nice?! There is no sense of brusque urgency here. No sense of mission…at least palpable. No burning urge to create change. But then objectivity kicked in and I forced myself to consider the environment I was coming from: a sports and celebrity management agency is hardly a smooth transitional place for development work. But it was something more than just my own paradigm shift. I am beginning to realize that especially here in Gujarat, the horrors of what took place in 2002 have still not even begun to heal. The memories of the insanity are still as fresh in people’s minds as if they happened yesterday. One cannot fail to miss the open shock and the shadow that passes over the faces of people here, the staff, as they brief me on what to expect and why it is they do what they do. This is when I felt ashamed of myself for the first time in quite a while. These people are nice…not because they make an effort to be so but because they are inherently friendly, earthy, amiable people. The shame was because I realized that we (and when I say we I encompass a lot of people) have forgotten what it is to be nice, to be polite; so used to the exterior shell of brusqueness that we have adopted thanks to our big city corporate environments, a smile is never quick on our faces, an eagerness to help never ready in our mind. We treat smiles with suspicion. We hear intrusions instead of questions.

Not even 12 hours here and already I am furiously trying to cope with the volume of lessons.