Narrative of Indore

         If Bombay is a crowd, then Indore is dust. Dust rules the city. Roads, houses, vehicles, apartments, highways, dhabas, palace façades, hawker's articles, billboards, showrooms, shopping complexes, temples-premises, sarais, railway station, bus stops, and many more places. Your hair, clothes, skins and faces gather layers of dust within hours. Even on the fifth floor of the clean and posh apartment situated on the rim of the city, your laptop shines with settled layers of dust if you leave it for one day or two uncovered. Ironically, the roadside food is popular in Indore. The land of this Malwa region appears to contain weak soil configuration that causes much dust, powder and dirt on the earth and in environment.

The nameplate of the train. The Rajbada is the palace -converted- museum.

           It was a cold December (2013) morning when I reached Indore railway station. It is a traditional and not modernized station. There are still both types of gauges- meter gauge and broad gauge.  It was still dark and fairly nippy outside. From inside the moving green black auto-rickshaw (CNG driven), I saw empty roads, early tea-selling shops (especially opened for the truck-drivers, daily wagers, and temple-goers), under-construction flyovers, necessary street-lighting and hoardings and billboards mostly written in Hindi. Even the residue banners of the  ruling political party (Bhartiya Janta Party) after the recent assembly elections were in Hindi, though their number, size, magnanimity and influence were not impressive. The reason was the popularity of the Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan as I was informed by the auto rickshaw driver. He said that the third successive and massive victory of Mr Chauhan was an account of the development in Madhya Pradesh in recent decades and thus, he did not need much election campaigning among people. Many fly-overs and roads were under construction.

The chilly and women labourers on the outskirts of Indore city

           Indore is traditional and conservative city in spirit and culture, but we can see the recent real estate and information technology boom in certain pockets of the city. Speedy blue metro buses like Ahamedabad city ply in the designated lanes on the wide roads, or else traditional modes of transportation are often available. The heart of the city is the vibrant shopping area called Rajwadi (like Sutlan Bazaar of Hyderabad) where the things are available at reasonably cheaper rates. In December, the warm clothes were piled up on  pulling carts along the sides of the narrow streets. Vegetarian dishes dominates the food culture of Indore. My friend travelled almost another part of the city  near the railway station to find out a good non-vegetarian hotel. Of course, there is some religious or spiritual impact of the Jainism on the people and their life, as the commerce, trade, cultural and religious life of Indore is driven by powerful Jain community to a good extent. The proximity to Ujjain city and many Jain temples (Kanch Mandir is famous), the numerous shops of sweets, and pure vegetarian restaurants and hotels can certainly confirm the vibrant presence, influence and hold of the Jain.

A tea-seller at Mandu (historical place), 100 km away from Indore

           Indore is expanding and stretching. The presence of big shopping malls, tall apartments, vast townships, multi-national companies, five-star hotels, higher education institutions,  the kingly palaces, old inns, congested and busy bazaars,  and welcoming people make the city an impeccable blend of tradition and modernity.

Behind the Smoky Screen: The August Narrative

If you are prohibited to enter the precinct of the women's hostels, if you are almost under the round-the-clock surveillance of CCTV cameras, if you are in a chaotically overcrowded (only) mess, if you share your small hostel room with your fellow(s), though you can see many incomplete rooms above your rooms, if you visit the library and discover the new arrival section empty and the journal section welcoming you with desolated wooden book racks, and if you encounter the Nano-car sized, dusty, rugged, and only playground, then you are in the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.

If you wake up in the morning and are undecided about your daily food arrangement, if you compromise to eat substandard and tasteless food in prehistoric looking cafeteria or the oily breakfast of the roadside vendors, if you walk into the Gothic corridors (littered with stinking garbage) during power-cuts, if you find the back entrance locked at 10.30 pm every night, if you pay around Rs 5000 towards mess deposit and discover it shut down, if you want to watch a cricket match and do not find a TV set for entertainment,  then you are the newly-joined certified boarder of the Basheer Men's Hostel of the same university.  

It hardly matters for us even after three weeks are gone since the commencement of the new academic year at the university. No wonder if the new male students struggle for getting food in time in the only mess that runs for us, because the men's hostel mess is waiting for minimum 100 members to join so that it can function. Those students have to hunt for food and attend the classes in time, so that there should not be attendance shortage at the end of the semester. It is all known to us that since last four years, almost every door of the first two floors of the Basheer hostel is knocked to pull up the internet connections, because the top four floors are not internet-equipped. The state of stagnation in terms of sports and games and cultural activities and the warehouse-type gymnasium fail to keep the general health intact. And the old residents feel that 'the paradise is lost.'

NB- While writing this post, there is no intention to demean the reputation of the university and its various institutions, but the whole idea is to foreground the problems we face. We all know that the discipline and the academic regularization are the achievement of our university in the recent past, but here, the purpose is to persuade the university to shake its resigned torpor.