Research visit to Gandhinagar

So tomorrow I will finally be moving into the flat with the other girls! It will be soo nice to be able to unpack everything finally and wash all my clothes and have my own bathroom! Wonderful!

Today we went on a magical mystery tour of Gandhinagar, the city I will be studying for my Fulbright. It is like 10 km north of Ahmedabad or so and is now the capital of the state of Gujarat. Nihal asked yesterday if someone could take us and give us a tour, so they found a couple of students, one from Gandhinagar and the other from Ahmedabad, to go with us. I don’t know if it was actually cooler today or it was that I was in an air conditioned car, whichever, it was nice not to be sooo hot today. It really is harder to think and concentrate on something when it’s so hot, so it was nice to be more coherent today… But it was fun – the roads are on a grid which is very unlike most Indian cities, so they are named by numbers and then letters in the Hindi alphabet. So there is the sound “guh” and a different one “ghuh” which is difficult for me, so they were trying to help me to get it right. We stopped at another step well on the wall, Adalaj. It was cool - it was the one I had actually seen before.

Anyway, it is at least very easy to get around and find your way in Gandhinagar, but I can understand how people say it is boring. It’s very different from other Indian cities, far, far less dense. And now it is sprawling towards Ahmedabad despite the fact that there still seems to be a lot of space left to develop in the city. The city is also divided up into sectors, each of these grids forms a sector and inside the sector is an inner ring road.

One sector is dedicated to the government buildings. There is one that is solely commercial – but it seems like it’s too much commercial for one area. There are several towers right next to each other, but several, the stores seemed to almost all be closed. Even in Ahmedabad there doesn’t seem to be that much pure commercial use all in one place and Gandhinagar is only 250,000 compared to almost 5 million!

There is this big temple there, apparently is kind of like a Disney-World-ish temple with light shows and such. We went in to take lunch. They were had the one student’s favorite Gujarati food, Kichidi, kind of like a yellowish rice and daal mixture with spices. It was really good! Anyway so we drove around the rest of the city, Nihal had to be back early so he could look for a flat or we could have stayed longer. The government provides housing for all its employees. There are different levels according to your rank in your position. So we went into some of the lowest ranking housing for cleaners and such, and then also for middle ranking engineers. It seems it’s a big problem of maintenance since the government owns the housing, it also maintains (or doesn’t maintain) them. Anyway it was a really great first tour of the city to provide a base of knowledge for me, and a fun day due to the lack of utter sweatiness and fun with Nihal and the two CEPT students.

I didn’t realize the stigma of women having men at their apartments! The girls I will be staying with were saying that it was difficult for single women to get their own flat to begin with, and then if they find out you have had men over, it’s even more difficult.

Caryn was looking at staying as a paying guest – her husband will be coming to visit later. The lady who runs the guest house said if she went out to meet her husband, he couldn’t come and say good bye to her in front of the house. He would have say goodbye down the street at the mall or something. I knew it was more conservative here, but it is still odd to see especially the disconnect between Indian music videos and the sexuality portrayed there, and then the actuality of things..

Caryn and I were coming out of a huge shopping center today, so there was a big auto rickshaw stand. I thought they were gonna fight over who got to drive the two white girls!