Field visits and the big city bug

Saturday 8/12/2006 1:10:22 PM

Ahmedabad, like any other place has its own idiosyncrasies. I will try and post a pictorial representation of what I mean soon.

As I completed my first field visit today in Ahmedabad. I visited a slum development program as well as a livelihood and life skills program. Both remarkable. Both not rocket science. The program imparts a 3 month training course to youth from underprivileged communities in IT, logistics management, hospitality and customer relationship and sales. Each and every boy and girl who graduate from this course gets a job. Interestingly, the livelihood program is completely government funded but yet the citizen sector organisation that runs it retains complete autonomy over how the program shall be run. Testimony to years of effort invested in building this rapport with the bureaucracy. The livelihood program has been so successful that the government now wants this CSO to scale the model to over 200 districts across Gujarat. Mouthwatering no?

Today I suddenly realized what it means to be a “big city” person. Despite its impressively large roads and profusion of malls, these are pretty much Ahmedabad's only claim to being a big city. In all other manner and reality, Ahmedabad is at best an aspiring small city. A few years back, it would probably have only qualified as a big town.

I suddenly began to notice deficiencies or absences of common sights and sounds which only a big city person would identify with: no glitzy cars streaking around, no shiny neon advertising and outdoor billboards shouting out the latest Levi’s collection, the astounding Esprit fall line up or the great sale at Adidas.

No lines of cafés, restaurants and bistros churning out average quality Italian, Chinese, North Indian and “Mughlai” food. Lets not even talk about basic Idli-vada joints because people in this part of the world are not enlightened enough to know what those are.

No Coffee houses! The Café Coffee Days are barely half full. Some almost empty. (Yes...no scantily clad teeny boppers puffing on hookahs here or Mr. Modi himself might appear to shut down the establishment)

Traffic at best doesn’t exist. At worst is a tranquil crawl, although people in Ahmedabad have even less road sense than they do in Bangalore or Bombay. Traffic management is a joke.

But yes all these can be attributed to my big city prejudices. The one thing that really made me feel alien was how people looked at me. I would almost immediately be singled out as an outsider. At a restaurant, at a cyber parlour, in a shop. There was no concept of being able to blend in, no room offered to belong. Most big cities I can any day blend in and just be another face but not so here. Despite speaking Gujarati. And Hindi.

I miss the big city. That was the conclusion of my observations. I am and forever will be a big city boy and I will always be restless in a city without the melting pot of chaos, sights, sounds, noise and cultures. 20 kinds of food, a hundred different languages, even more ways of dressing.

I miss diversity.