Prologue

Thursday 8/10/2006 10:29 PM

A whirlwind 2 days in Bombay: Ultra Chic Bandra, hilarious conversations till 4 AM, noisy and music bereft Toto’s, homely & warm Mulund, great Raksha Bandhan food, innovative primary educational solutions at Muktanga, local train madness, traffic madness, the occasional torrential downpour. If ever one needs convincing that Bangalore is the most livable city in India, pay a visit to Bombay. I don’t need convincing but my conviction is reinforced anyway.

Now I am on a train to Ahmedabad.

Now I have also begun reading a book titled “Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy” by Siddharth Varadarajan, the book is a recount of the horror that were the communal riots in the state of Gujarat in February 2002. An apt read I think, considering a lot of my interaction over the next 3 weeks will be with people who were crippled by these very acts of orchestrated, planned insanity.

My thoughts at this point are straining on a leash. Yet again, I am going into an environment and a part of the world where my preconceived ideas and perceptions about how that place is, what the people are like and what the general air of the place would be are all going to be turned upside down. I can feel it.

I can’t help but also feel a little prophetic, having just read a book about the creation of the state of Israel and of the return of its people to their real homes. I have never had any connection with Gujarat in my entire life, other than that I speak fairly fluent Gujarati, I love the food and I once led an entire delegation of 40 eighteen- year -old AIESECers to a conference beyond Gujarat where we were forcibly made to camp at a hot, desolate, dirty swamp of a town called Vapi. These apart, nothing else connects me to this state or its people. No relatives. No friends now that Aakash is in Bangalore. I don’t in any way feel Gujarati or harbour any feeling of belonging to the place or its people. Let us see if my first visit to the land of Gandhi stirs up any latent feelings of belonging. It would be too romantic to hope for any stirrings of passion akin to the ones all Jews claim to experience when they set foot in “Eretz Israel” but I shall wait to experience.