The city

Finally, I’ve had the chance to pen something down about this city. There is so much I have to say about this little city of Gujarat, whose name I cannot even spell right, even after being here for over 3 weeks.

A’bad, (which is how I will refer to this place hereafter, because I’m tired of getting spell check to correct me at every instance) is the city of food and for the ladies, of Shopping! Those, I regretfully say, are the only two activities people tend to engage in out here! It’s almost a pity.  There are like two major malls that I’ve been to over here, and they aren’t much really. The malls in Delhi Chennai and Bangalore are way better. So I don’t really get the ‘shopping’ craze over here. They go to the same places and buy the same stuff, All the Time!

The life of the city is somewhat as follows: Nothing opens before 10 am. No general stores, no medical stores, no banks, nothing. Even breakfast places open after 10, as does my office. And people work mornings and shut in the noon for lunch. They work again from 3:30 pm to 6:30 pm and shut for the day after that. By 9 in the night, people steer clear off the streets and all you get to hear is the sound of the grasshoppers and the owls hooting. It’s uncanny. You get no food after 11 pm anywhere.

A’bad is also called Modi-land. And in Modi-land, mind you, you cannot “misbehave”. I put the term misbehave in double quotes because Modi has a special definition for what he considers good behaviour and what he considers bad behaviour. As most of you know, (well at least the ones who like a drink or two sometimes) Gujarat is a dry state and A’bad is no exception. It is sinful to drink here. Seeing women smoke on the public roads draws weird street-Romeos towards them as though they’ve found their ideal prey. Girls with cigarettes in their hands are considered ‘loose’. Hookah bars are places whores hang out at with their fellow-mates. They check your ID to make sure you’re over 18 at a hookah bar, but it’s okay to ride a bike as a minor On the wrong side of the road over here and without a helmet too. Non-vegetarian is a rarity here. You’ll find barely any restaurants serving meat.

Food here is to gujju taste – Sweet. I swear they serve me sweet yogurt along with my dosai here. Its almost funny! The water here tastes like rat poison. Its so bad it turns your body-system upside down until you turn all weak and forlorn (of course unless you’ve grown up to drink rat poison for water. Then you’ve just gotten used to it).

What do people do here after 8 pm? The senior citizens of the house sit on the porch and gossip with their neighbours and the others (men women children) take a stroll, maybe even get some ice cream, if they happen to find an open ice cream store.

I happen to live in the most genteel locality of A’bad called ‘C.G. Road’. All you have on this road are restaurants, jewellery stores, shoe stores and banks. And petrol pumps. May be if you really look, you might find a college or two. You have to walk miles to find a decent general store or supermarket. It’s so frustrating! And you don’t even want me to get started on the weather. It is humid and hot, and I’m talking in terms of it being 46 degrees Celsius in the peak afternoon of mid-June when it rains in most other places on half the earth! God really must hate these poor Gujjus.

Accommodation

my girls in A'bad

Accommodation wasn’t hard to find over here. I found myself a decent PG (as in Paying Guest, not Post Graduate for heaven’s sake!) against 5000 bucks, wherein they agreed to do my laundry and feed my tummy three times a day. A good deal I say! Of course, I did not get the luxury of Air condition or anything remotely close to that. I have been living at the mercy of the weather each day, praying like the Indians did fifty years ago, to shower blessings upon us in the form of cool raindrops. But God hasn’t been too generous yet.

The sounds of my surroundings are strange. Mostly they consist of little boys and girls screaming when someone hits a six in a game of gully-cricket, or when someone breaks a window pane. In the late nights and early mornings however, you can hear eagles, koels, sparrows and crows too. They’ve apparently taken over cock-a-doodle-doo’s job ‘round here.

My PG, although shabby, is extremely lively. Lots of fun-loving, hard-working chicks around here, all of whom have left families back home to pursue careers and studies and make something out of their lives. There are chicks from Madhya Pradesh and Rajisthan, from Mount Abu and Kutch, from Chennai and  Bihar, from Delhi and Hyderabad (ahem, that included me, if you noticed). Mostly it consists of MBA students, CA aspirants and well interns like me who work summers. There’s also a Law student around here. Another frequent visitor at my PG is the Langoor. Yes, I’m serious. Unlike the normal brown-faced monkeys that come by my home to steal the mangoes in Hyderabad, these are the grey ones with black faces that you would normally see an the Hyderabad zoo. They come early mornings and try to get their hands on my watch that is kept on the window sill. They’ve never been able to reach it though.

Langoor!

Besides the lovely sound of birds every morning, another amazing thing about A’bad is its auto rickshaw.  I’ve never seen ricks this cheap and auto-wallas this honest, Anywhere. I mean it. If it takes 7 bucks to some place, they will not charge you a paisa more. As a person who is used to commuting by autos in other cities like Pune and Hyderabad, and paying a minimum of Rs 20 irrespective of the distance travelled, I feel so happy to see such honesty that I actually pay them extra! It takes me 12 bucks one way till my office and I usually walk back.

Workplace

It’s called MICORE – M  udra Institute of Communications Research. It’s the best part of the city. I sometimes don’t believe I’m saying this (and I usually crib about going to work) but I look forward to working most days (there are always exceptions of course!). As the name of the suggests, I’m into Media Research broadly and Journalism and New Media Research in particular.

If everything goes my boss’s way, I will hopefully be able to present the paper I’m working on, at a well-known international conference in Noida. But that is still an ‘If” so keep your fingers crossed for me!

The environment is extremely conducive to work, except at noon, when I get a bit drowsy because of the full tummy and the droning sound of the AC. People there are nice too, and not all of them are gujaratis. Some are rajisthanis, some Bengalis, some marathis and well, the rest gujjus. An interesting amalgamation of culture, I say!

One month at work is almost over. There is another month to go. I spent one month (4 weeks) at my office at C G Road and the other month, I will spend at MICA, which is about 40 kilometres to get to from where I’m located today and on the way I cross nearly 3 villages. So I’m almost going cross country starting next week. I’d probably be dog-tired by the time I reached home.

Entertainment

One weekend I saw a rock show here in Gujarat. There were four bands, two from Baroda and two from Surat. It took the first band, which was from Baroda, called Lazy Bums, one hour to do sound check!  The other band from Baroda, Sweetblame, was a high schoo  l punk band that mainly did covers of Blink 182, green day and the likes. The third one was a classic rock band from Surat called New Fools of Old Skool, claiming, as the name suggests, to be a classic rock band. They were okay. Their setlist was lousy. The fourth and in this case, I’d say, the headliner was called Antariksh from Surat also, who did a tribute to Pink Floyd. They were great. Like a really good friend of mine says, you can’t go wrong with Floyd!

Other entertainment here has been purely my roomies and apartment mates at my PG. one weekend I saw 3 movies – Crusade in Jeans, Aa Dekhe Zara and Kal Kisne Dekha. The two Hindi movies seemed to be the same to me. They both had similar themes. In fact all the three had something to do with time travel.

To conclude

Not having updated so ever so long, I’ve compensated by writing an entry that went into 1500 words. So before you run away (if you already haven’t that is), I shall put an end to this post. I still have another 4 weeks to go before I am done with my Internship here. I plan to visit baroda one weekend before I go. My fan makes an awful noise, quite like a million mice scuttling about nibbling on slabs of cheese. So before I gross myself out completely, I better stop right here.