delhi by driving

I have formally initiated my fieldwork for my PhD. However, this is not a post about my fieldwork. It is about the processes, journeys and engagements from my first attempt at ethnographic research to the moment now where I am much better acquainted with the practice, theoretically, intellectually, and at the ground level of actually conducting research. It helps that I am a much more relaxed person as well. Age does have its benefits.

I have been in Delhi for long enough to know enough about it and feel lost in other cities and contexts outside of the comfort of the familiar. I came to Delhi from a small town where a visit to market implied that most of the people knew what you went shopping about. It had its charm, especially, when the gossip was about others. Personally, the Big Brother gaze made me nervous and irritable. I was just on the verge when literature is no longer about bed time stories but becomes a part of your life, defines your part of life, directs it. It was that stage when literature, poetries, commentaries gave the much needed solace from reality. I needed the intensity of passion, the spectacle of drama, the driving need to believe in something, anything. In short, I needed my space. The picturesque small town where I grew up did not give me that. It was around this time that after completing my school my family shifted to Delhi. One of the main reasons to do so was for me to undertake my higher studies, graduation. This itself was a major point of contention between my parents and me. The issue was what to study, what to specialize in, which subject will ensure I have a flawless career, substantial savings. Career, savings, bank balance, these things because I didn't have, didn't mean anything to me. They still don't. I am not suggesting that I don't care about money. I want to make enough money to never have to ask anyone for it. At that point, it didn't matter at all. My parents wanted me to pursue one of the science subjects. I, on the other hand, wanted to study either history or literature. After many discussions, my parents gave into History; studying literature, story books, as a graduate course was not acceptable. So, I set about settling in Delhi with a lot of histories to learn.

From the first sight of it, I loved Delhi. The anonymity, the vastness, the traffic; everything allowed you to loose yourself. I smoked my first cigarette in public without having to constantly looking over my shoulder or drowning myself in cheap perfume to hide the smell. I went on long bike rides with no so well known boys not dreading the relatives and not-so-good-friends. In the initial years of my association with Delhi, I was self-indulgent. I was exploring myself in the city. Not the city in myself or even the city in the city. At that time, I reckon, I had not even settled the city in myself. I was still exploring the corners and conversations. Every time I would go to a new area, a new connection with the city would be formed. At that time, I relied on public transportation to navigate my way across the city. So it were bus numbers carefully noted down on crumbled notes. Any secret rendezvous was designed around these connections; the bus timetables, the frequencies. In the initial years, I loved traveling in buses. The idea that hundreds of lives were bundled together in this steel, engine, fuel, and human concoction to approach different realities, different destinations, different loves without having to bother even the courteous glance was nothing less than liberating for me. A lot of my friends would plug in earphones while traveling on the bus. Not me. I wanted to hear the city conversations. I wanted to hear what the lovers were quarrelling about, whom the friends were gossiping about, where people were going, and the moments of exhilaration, the deepest fears and secret affairs. I guess without begin aware of it, I was indulging in the ethnographic voyeurism. Only that at that moment, I was the one who was researching myself. I wanted to know about my life through the million, different lives lived. I was slowly settling in. The city was slowly settling in me. Little did I know then that this was the love affair which would last a lifetime.

Once I got settled, I guess at some moment, I stopped being in so much in awe of the city. The surface was being scratched and I was getting a sneak peak into other politics, policies, and practices that make the city. With the anonymity came the dread and fear of being murdered, raped, or cornered. With the increasing traffic came the realization of the increased fuel prices and jams, the student life was not all about ha-ha-he-he it threw at my face, Marx and Hegel, Right and Left wing. I had to make my own choices, decisions. I was compelled to have an opinion. A lot of things, which I had taken, for granted, never had to engage with, were being carefully dissected. Class, caste, gender, and religion which if not a very important element of my everyday life but nevertheless omnipresent almost 'neutral' categories were now sites of theoretical, intellectual, and personal examination. A new prism and perspective, which was mine, in which I selected and rejected ideas and notion was forming. This was a very volatile period of my life. Everything I had taken for granted was being challenged by myself. I felt lost. I found myself feeling things, which I had never articulated earlier. It wasn't a metamorphosis of any sorts. I think I was just, finally, getting into my own skins. In my new skins, I found a new city in the city. This was the city were the connections between lives wasn't a romantic ambition but a reality. The corners were not secluded but were connected through many, many visible and invisible maps. One bang somewhere had a resonance elsewhere. However, my involvement with this city was as platonic as with the earlier city, which was settled in me now. These were also the days when I was experimenting with smokable stuff other than tobacco, lots of cheap alcohol, Salinger, burgess, Kerouac, Neruda. I was also on Prozac for a while, a fact, which I advertised, more than keeping it under wraps. Why should it be under wraps, anyway? So, evidently, reality was a bit blurred for me and so was the city in me, outside of me. I was living in a world where I did not bother to take the public transport anymore, I was much more at home wandering in the dark bushes and cold stones with strangers, where I wanted to cry out with Floyd instead of indulging in strange conversations, I was losing out on the city, in me, outside of me. I was living in insulated, isolated realities where the only thing mattered was my skewed emotions over others. I did gain something out of that phase in my life, I guess. Probably I indulged so much in myself during those three years that for the next few I was prepared to face the reality.

As of now, I seem to be the protagonist of this narrative. I am not. The city I have discovered in all these years. The city which I has settle in me and the city in which I have squatted.

My romantic, platonic association with the city came to an end with a sudden jolt. One day I had the security of a family, house, siblings, dogs, a future charted out. The next day I was living in boy's hostel. I was still studying. I had never worked before. I have never thought I ever would work. Even when I had thought of doing something, it went as far as heading a cult. So, in short, I had no idea with the real world, real city. Looking back now, I am glad that my relationship with the city, which now I am settled in and which is settled in me, was based on this jolt. At that moment, this incident of leaving the security of my parents home to fend for myself was the most significant thing that ever happened to me. However, I wasn't devastated. I felt liberated of moving beyond having to answer for everything, to be told, to confront, to cry. It was with this sense of liberation that I approached the city as well. Everything about it was enchanting for me. Now beyond my romantic and platonic prism, the city offered possibilities for someone like me who had no specialized knowledge, no skills, no substantial degree. In that initial period, the city epitomized the democratic spirit. I was excited. All the ideas of breaking the boundaries and creating one owns fluid zones seemed like a reality. But only till the time I started to look for a job and then for a place to stay. All kinds of prejudices and biases were thrown at my face. The fact that I could not give my parents reference as a social security to vouch for my character worked against me when I tried to get jobs. The fact that I was a single, young woman made a lot people not rent out their spaces to me. I represented the corrupting, moral influence of the day. I soon realized the territories in which I would feel safe. It was not only the matter of traveling alone at night or even at day time but the invisible security system which made me feel safe had been untimely terminated. I constantly felt alone and under threat. My careless romantic indulgence of trusting strangers was giving way to treating everyone with suspicion. I clung to my bag with no possessions a bit too tightly. I always tried to get the corner, window seats on the buses not so much because I wanted to look outside but because I didn't want anything to do with the insides of it. The overheard everyday conversations of family, friends, normal quarrels, regular lunches began to irritate me. I was beginning to get very agitated with the city. This was not the city, which I had allowed to grow in me, within me. It didn't embrace me with both arms; it didn't provide me with the corners where I could feel safe. Instead it constantly challenged everything I did. My being young, single, woman was used by many of the cities in the city. It was around this time that I first starting fantasizing about settling along the beach, walking on moon lit nights with flowers in my hair: a classic romantic get away situation. I knew I could not. I knew I would not. Though I wasn't settling very well in the city, the city had settled in me. There were still some auto rides, which made me feel light. There were still many bus drives, which didn't ask my name and didn't care where I went. There was a kindness, which would come to me from people, places at the most unwarranted hours and moments.

I would still find poetry in places. So I stayed and glad I am that I did.

Sometime in this phase, where my association with the city was based on caution and control, I started working in a research centre. A new media urban research centre. God only knows how I got that job. I had no idea about new media forget media at all, urban was a lived reality for me it wasn't a theoretical, intellectualized category for me. However, I got the job. I learnt a lot from working in this space. But still the reality of this space was far more distant than reality itself. The urban was there but it was a hyperbolic, displaced category. The new-media jargon had little with the everyday reality of what I saw. Maybe I didn't not see enough. Working in this space was like being on acid. It was a bubble suspended with no connections and contexts. Everything happened in its own context, when I wandered out, which I rarely did, I could not relate to it. People could not relate to me. Till date I don't know what was wrong, with me, with my reality, with this place. However, it was this place where I started engaging with spaces in the city within research agenda. It wasn't voyeuristic, romantic, highly personalized journeys but visits undertaken to understand something.

That was my first ‘ethnographic’ experience without even actually knowing what it entailed. At that time, I was working in a market place, which specializes in second hand hardware (computers) and pirated software. I was beginning to understand and marvel at the wonders of the digital technologies. I was fascinated by what bits of chips, bytes of codes could do. I sought and found poetry in it. I fell in love with these poets. So, Nehru Place, where these digital technologies had a canvas outside of the poetry and poets, an everyday reality to it completely enchanted me. The fact that this ‘ethnographic’ research wasn’t directed by specific research agendas and questions gave me the liberty and the freedom to explore many trends, trajectories. Not always the best approach but for a novice like me it was the almost the best self-taught ethnographic experience I could gather. As I progressed, the categories of field site, field visits, respondents, data collection, interviews, interpretation started gaining weight. I love and still loved the experience of Nehru Place. I still visit that space on a regular interval and every time I go, I see a new melody and hear a new story.

It was the experience of this space which instutionalized and internalized my voyeurism into a respected profession to follow through. However, it was not until I started working on an independent research project that I actually began to understand the nuances of ethnographic research. While conducting this research, which involved intense and intimate association with the everyday of people instead of technologies I had to learn to unlearn a lot of things. I was forced to investigate my own standing, background, prejudices, and perceptions. Through carefully following this trajectory of researching myself while conducting the research brought to fore front the politics of ethnographic research. I realized that as an ethnographer I need to pay particular heed to the methodology and practice of ethnography as it is in this very practice that the construction of categories is embedded.

With this understanding, I undertake yet another journey to explore yet another aspect of my city!