Steve and I have been here several days now. Helped by our colleague Lokesh Ghai we have made contacts, bought supplies and played around with materials and ideas. But neither of us have got around to setting up the blog we promised in our research proposal. CJ got straight onto it and by the end of her first evening there was no reason not to blog.
One thing that stands out is coincidence, synchronicity - call it what you will. There have been a few examples, but I'll restrict myself to two in this post to avoid stretching credibility.
Coincidence number one
I came on board the Pol Project later than CJ and Steve. As we were talking about how my interests would integrate with theirs, I mentioned that my only other visit to India had been a six week trip to Ahmedebad with my sister in 1980. She'd won a travelling scholarship and I'd gone along to keep her company.
As we discussed the Pol Project, Steve explained that he and Kate Egan were working on an additional installation taking a woodcut by "someone from Pethapur Village - a master wood block cutter called Mr Gajjar" as their ispiration.
I emailed my sister. I had a visual image of a house several storeys high with a number of young apprentices sitting at floor level carving blocks - but I couldn't remember his name or the name of the village.
Ant sent me the transcript of her diary entry for that day:
Sept 27th 1980
Pethapur village, about hour bus ride and 5 mins rickshaw from Gandhinagar. Blockmaker Shri Maneklal Mistry Gajjar the beeba-wala. Made a master craftsman in 1979, has up to 10 apprentices. They come from the local area, about 20 apply, then a committee from the All India Handicrafts (?) come from Bombay and he sets the applicants little tasks to do in front of the committee and about 6 children are selected to train. They are paid 80rps a month by the government. Maneklal provides the wood and anything the apprentices make belongs to him...(cont.)
Mr Gajjar is so well known that it would strange if Ant hadn't arranged to see him, given that she was researching Indian textiles - but it was great to discover I had this connection to the project.
Coincidence number two
On our second day here Lokesh took us to see Debashish Nayak, the Advisor to the Heritage Programme for Ahmedebad Municipal Corporation. While we were in his office he mentioned a book about the old part of Ahmedebad called The Walled City by Esther David. The following day at the bookshop Crossword I bought it, happy to discover it is a novel - the only one I can afford to read on what is definitely not a holiday. Just as we were leaving the shop, Lokesh stopped momentarily and asked me to give him the book.
A woman who had just stepped out of an Auto was walking towards the bookshop and Lokesh was approaching her.
"...and these are my colleagues from Manchester," he was saying as we caught up with him "and Amanda just bought a copy of your book."
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