Sitting in Los Angeles, a software engineer gasps at the headlines on Samachar.com, ’’Five burnt alive in Ahmedabad.’’ He shakes his head and mumbles, ’’India is burning.’’ The news is everywhere. Go to any Indian website: You find only two headlines. Gujarat and Narendra Modi.
On my last trip to India, I found out something truly remarkable. Ahmedabad or not! India is still running great. There may be communal clashes in some parts of Ahmedabad but the nation as a whole is still maintaining the integrity. Rahim bhayya is still selling coconuts on Mount Road Madras and Neha Bhatt is still roaming around with her friends at eight in the night in Ramdev Nagar of Ahmedabad.
This is not a travel chronicle. This is just a description of my thoughts on Ahmedabad, the city of tragedies.
A couple of years ago, Mother Earth all of a sudden decided to try out break dance. Ahmedabad was the default choice.
Nature’s anger has been kept hidden under wraps… then God says ’’Let Ahmedabad be’’ and the whole city snaps!
Thousands of people died. Blame goes to those building contractors who had not paid any attention to the idea of Earthquake proofing their buildings. ’’No one has predicted this. How can anyone be so proactive?’’ was their argument but the bottom line was pretty clear. There were lapses on everyone’s part. The quake was not a very intense one on the Richter scale but the devastation was unparalleled.
Barely a kilometer from my brother’s apartment complex was a twin tower apartment complex. The two towers had no central beam. They had no beams connecting the spines of the two mighty structures. As a result one of them collapsed like a pack of cards… and almost the same number of people died when residents of the other tower tried to escape from the building. They opened their front doors and ran out only to be dropped a good hundred feet to the ground.
Is it cursed? Plague attacked Surat. Then Quake attacked Ahmedabad. Now religious fundamentalism is showing its ugly face.
Back in the 15th century an Ahmed Shah conquered ’’Karnavati’’ and changed its name to Ahmedabad (The City of Ahmed). The government is now proposing to reverse this name change.
In line with Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Tiruvananthapuram, Ahmedabad shall be called ’’Karnavati’’.
Fair enough. There had been no major opposition to this move. Though there has never been any real secularism in that state of Gujarat, people had accepted the fact that money was more important than anything else. They put business ahead of religion. And Gujarat had become the most industrialized state in no time.
My brother’s neighbor, an aging businessman iterates the same - ’’We have never been secular. All the other states were secular. But Gujarat has never been a secular state. It is a highly business oriented state and hence people have so far been tolerant of each other... But secularism? No. Gujarat is nowhere near it.’’
Ahmedabad fascinates me to no extent. In Satyagrah Chavni, a religious mob is attacking people belonging to another religion. In the adjoining Ramdev Nagar, teenage girls are flocking together to eat Ice Ka Laddu at the roadside shop. The army is firing endlessly to scatter the mobs and barely a kilometer from the battle zone, a middle class family of a wife, a husband and a four year old kid are busy eating this very famous Ice Ka Laddu.
Bottom-line? The riots have failed to affect the daily life of most Ahmedabadis or Karnavatians. Life for most of us and for most those in Ahmedabad goes on… Riots or not! They simply cannot stop eating Ice Ka Laddu.