Big Brother is watching you!

His eyes were constantly glued to the television set right across. I had heard that men usually pick up places in restaurants, shops where they can clearly see the scores of cricket matches, tennis matches and F1 races. I thought that may be he is busy looking at that. Well, I did check see the newspapers that day and didn't see any notifications about live cricket matches or anything interesting coming up.

After a long interview, I looked back. The television showed some random rooms, one after the other. A young man was combing his hair and He was busy looking at the actions. Another video showed a bed near huge boxes and a guy was drinking tea in a plastic cup. After around 20 locations, I turned my head and saw the remote control in His hand. He grinned at me and told me that these are the places where he stores all his goods. Fire crackers from Sivakasi. He called someone and said, why is that guy spending so much time on drinking tea and combing and I saw suddenly on the television that they started lifting the heavy fire crackers.

This was also the case with the next room, where I saw people pinching each other's elbows, Big Brother is watching you! The chain was huge and long. This shop had videos from 40 locations. Another shop's big brother was small scale manager and he had cameras at only 5 locations in the house/store house. I came to know that this has been the case since a long time, when the Gola Ranas and the Ghanchis decided that they weren't able to cope with the management of so many workers under them in Jari business. For the Gola Ranas, it was still easy because most of the workers were either relatives or known ones. Those who had huge Jari industry set ups, they had to bring in some element of Big Brother in them but the rest were fine. When the Ghanchis entered the Powerloom sector after 1965, once Ashok Mehta gave the permit of buying powerloom machineries to everyone. This not only created a boom in the textile sector, with the increase of machineries from one thousand to one lakh, but it also gave them ideas of replicating the vigilance machineries. Ghanchis were expert in copying any machinery, skill from anywhere. It is said that in 1974, in the expo in Japan, the factories were closed during the Ghanchi visit because they might copy everything if the factories were working and those factories would lose their monopoly.

It is unknown how the idea of video vigilance started in the Surti communities, but He said that he brought it first in Surat when He had to take care of both the medical store and the Fire Crackers. Replicating what goes on in the super stores was easy, put cameras and see what is going on. He says he started in the 1990's. How He made his style of video displays (the Ghanchi skill) and how that has added to the growing industries of Surat.

Kabir Mohanty says, "We are individually multiple."
Sometimes, Our multiplicity is individual.

Cooking Alliances?

Hostel dining rooms always seemed a ritual for me, where you stand in a queue with your plate, say your room number and then sit on the huge metallic shining table to gulp all that was there on the plate. Sometimes, the gulping verb would turn to savoring and enjoying. But it was never more than that. If you don't like the food of this mess, shift to another. There were a lot of them (especially if your energy can be invested in going outside the halls of residence and eating at the tiffin services). I could never imagine anything more than this happening over a plate of lunch/dinner in the tiffin services.

And when you never thought about dinners and lunches catering to more than this, you would be definitely amused when you hear that wedding proposals and love was also catered to, in the catering businesses. It just gets you more interested in how! (of course, the way proposals are presented is quite interesting).

Surat's urbanism developed in fascinating ways and there could not be one linear pattern you can follow. And for me, the most interesting time frame is when the Diamond industry and the Textile industry developed. The Diamond industry mainly had migrants from Mehsana, Kathiawad who could not earn much in farming in the Saurashtra region. The Diamond Industry flourished with the industrious workers who slept in the same factory and considered the place as their 'home'. But there was one issue, most of them didn't know how to cook. What could be done about this, during the 1970's, when there were hardly reasonable restaurants and eateries outside? Women in the Surti communities, mainly in the Ghanchi and Golas were quite good at cooking and they had the 'business acumen', be it in the Jari, or in the 'saraiya' business. They started the tiffin services and the Kathiawadi workers who came to dine here found it very cheap. (around 45 Rs per month when the restaurant offered thalis for 4 Rs per meal)

The men who had migrated, did not have a lot of property back in the villages and had quite a difficult time finding a suitable match for them. Here, they earned better compared to the earnings through Jari work in Ranas and the shifted powerloom sector in the Ghanchis. Golas and Ghanchis consume liquor and they were fine with the workers bringing in a quarter everyday and drinking in the house where the meal was served.
They tried to woo the women in the Rana and the Gola communities by bringing expensive gifts and that one quarter peg, of approximately 7 Rs per day. So the women would think, "aah, he can afford liquor worth 7 Rs per day, so how rich he may be!" (As told by a ghanchi man)

The city's lure for easy money and luxurious life did tempt the women and some of them decided to get married to the Kathiawadi diamond workers. The workers were quite happy with the alliance because they could show off in their villages that they got a 'city girl' as their wife. (and of course, they got a wife)

I am sure there are other complexities involved in the alliances between various communities of Surat, like the Ghanchis, Khatris, Golas and Kathiawadis, may be the mobility of women because of work culture allowed in Ghanchi and Golas, may be the alarming sex ratio of women and men in the Kathiawadis and the Ghanchis, or may be the economic tie ups translating into social tie ups. But this one's fascinating.

Dinner tonight?

And you thought, this is the only way to ask someone out.

Kitsch-es and Cliches

They sprinkle them with cyanide, those elongated wires from copper rods. They play with silver, they play with the constant humming sounds of the winding into kasabs, those rolls. They match the sounds with the songs and jokes on the radio channels, playing loudly through black speakers. They compare its thickness with the strands of hair. They try to make it glistening through gold plating and flattening. Sometimes, all that glitters, has some amount of gold, probably 30 grams in 100 kgs of copper, beautifully made into threads. They run through Kimonos in Japan, minutely blossoming into golden flowers, or inspiring a writer by taking form of small pattern in a diary. Oh, you might be wearing a scarf from France bought via Madame Soussou that has antique golden threadwork. Or who knows, you are glued to a textile art piece in the Metropolitan museum in New York that states its existence in Safavid, Iran.

But people of the Rana Samaj do not know that which bride blushes in her Banarasi Saree, filled with the Zardozi work of these threads, Jari. They just know the constant working hours, that fetches them 5-7 thousand every month. Their hair smell of chemicals used in the gilding process. Their fingers, as if made blunt and short through constant work and their eyes yellowed and greyed with vision of work in those narrow gala type houses. Gola Ranas live in the typical gala type houses in Surat. Their houses are long and narrow, just to accommodate those Jari machines. These houses were probably constructed by the Britishers after a fire diminished the slums in the early 1920's (that's what their narratives told me). Their memories peal when they see the road running on the Kotsafil road close to the walled area of the city. They remember the dirty moat running through the city which has been covered and a road runs on the same path now. Even today, their life is all within the circled area of that moat and their relatives living within that area. Their Surat is quite small, with its own borders and its own communities. In the Ka, Kha, Ga, Gha of Surti communities, (Ka for Kanbi, Kha for Khatri, Ga for Golas and Gha for Ghanchis), they have replaced the Ka with Kathiawadis. The traders and the merchants in the Jari industry were Kanbis and they had the hold over the capital till the 1960's. Kanbis did the labour work and brought the Jari home for flattening it and filling them into kasabs.Women in the Rana community also indulged in the work and tied the Jari bundles with cotton and wool threads and saved 50 grams of gold in every 100 kgs of gold as the weight of the final product increased with the threads.After saving money, they raised capital for buying their own machineries, lowered the costs by asking every member in the house to work in the Jari production and literally threw out the Kanbis from the Jari industry. Kanbis used to calculate individual labor cost, rent of the house (even if they owned the house) and other small costs. Ranas never did that and kept the Jari prices quite low. Agents from Bangalore, Banaras, Coimbatore started buying from the Ranas.

But somewhere the complexity has occurred and the Ranas could never play with the markets and the savings could never translate into accumulating more capital. Capital could not generate capital, losing on the front of 'small town capitalism'. Capital again went to the Kathiawadis and the Marwaris in Surat in the form of contracts and initial supply of materials. Although, there are still saddened faces of the Ranas with the fluctuation of the prices of the precious metals- silver and gold because they face lots of problems with the payments on finished products.

But they still dance wearing glittery sarees on loud music when they go to weddings. Some of them still drink Jack Daniels in the evening just to forget the day's hard work. They still dream of owning ATM cards so that they'll be allowed in the shopping malls in the posh localities like Ghod-dod road in Surat. Women love the autonomy of spending the way the like- be it on a tea in the nearby tea-stall or be it on the latest Deepika Padukone movie. They don't mind being the actors of Modern times and enjoy the form of leisure as defined by James Fulcher, going to the Piplod area every Sunday and enjoying food sitting on the pavements in 'Gaurav-path'.

They create Kitsch-es, with piles and piles of glitter to be woven into popular art and piles of smiles to be imitated by all the workers.

Their story is a cliche, to be entangled in the world of capitalism. Almost everyone today has his/her form of the same story.