People and Places

Please note: all the events, places and people described in this journal are real, but out of respect for the individuals concerned the names of all major characters and certain organisations (including Bharti Vikas Samiti) have been altered, although in certain cases photographs have been included.

Udaipur, a beguiling confection of lakes, palaces and winding lanes, is one of the principle cities in Rajasthan, the archetypally romantic state of North India. It is home to a surprising number of Non-Governmental Organisations devoted, in their various ways, to the uplift of the rural and urban poor. I joined one of these, Bharti Vikas Samiti, as a volunteer for five months, alongside characters such as:

Ellen:  interesting, intelligent and great company, Ellen became one of my best friends among the volunteers and we enjoyed fascinating conversations and debates.

Anna: whimsical, relaxed and an integral part of our volunteer social life. She spent much of her time at Bharti Vikas Samiti on a project involving buffaloes.

Rachel: a passionate environmentalist with a great sense of justice. She, Ellen and I had been contemporaries at Cambridge without ever meeting each other.

Zelda Weiss: an exceptionally charismatic and vibrant Californian who effortlessly brightened up any social gathering.

Priya: a young lady from Haryana, part career woman, part dreamy, old-fashioned romantic. I found her a little drippy at first, but we later became great friends.

Yogesh: a rural development student from Tata-dhan Academy in Madurai, originally from Orissa in the east. A fervent and very vocal lover of Bollywood songs.

Amir: another Tata-dhan student, a year below Yogesh. A somewhat tortured soul, with highly idealised notions of love and friendship.

The following were staff at Bharti Vikas Samiti:

Dilip Mishra: a tremendously enthusiastic and eloquent member of the Natural Resource Department who managed my first project.

Sumita Ahuja: the head of the People’s Management School, and nominally in charge of the volunteers. A difficult and unpopular woman, she was strikingly handsome with short hair and she always wore trousers.

Tapan: an engineer who assisted with my first project.

Chandrika: the pretty, rather highly strung lady who managed my second project.

The IRMAns were a group of ten volunteers from the Institute of Rural Management in Anand (IRMA) in Gujarat, including:

Dhanvant: the ringleader, a kindly, intelligent young man from Jammu.

Karan: a deceptively shy 22-year old from Dehra Dun. He turned out to be one of the most unusual, and in some ways most irritating human beings I have ever met.

Satish: Karan’s field partner - there was no love-lost between the two.

Arun Kumar: the self-appointed clown, fond of his tipple. Originally from Bihar, in the east.

Lalita: in her mid-twenties and enormously charismatic, she was quite unlike any Indian girl I had met before and became a good friend.

Deepak: an intelligent, handsome man of thirty with a deep love of Indian music and a fascination with the Persian and Arabic influences on Indian culture.

Outside the NGO, I made other Udaipuri friends, both in the local area and in the more touristy parts of the old town:

Hari: the young, rakish proprietor of a marble carvings boutique in the touristic heart of old Udaipur.

Jairam (Bablu): nephew of the owner of a guesthouse in old Udaipur and another of my friends in this part of town.

Shiv: acted as my interpreter for a field survey, and (almost) from the beginning became a friend and central component of my social life in Udaipur.

Prakash: initially introduced as a friend of Shiv’s, he rapidly became a good friend in his own right and we frequently had long and fascination conversations over chai.

Madhu: my singing teacher and the daughter of Dr Nirmal Khandelwal, head of the music faculty at Udaipur university.
   
Dinesh: ran a small bookshop in old Udaipur. His soft-spoken intelligence and honesty appealed to me and I used to drop in for chai and conversation.

Abbas: a delightful gem, who I met too late in my stay. He was a member of the Bohra community, a wealthy branch of Ismaili (Shiite) Islam.

My first project was a forest management study in a tiny village called Maal, where I met the following:

Amratlal: my main point of contact in the village. A shopkeeper, miller and ever-placid family man.

Suraj: a mercurial but amiable young farmer and Bachelor of Arts

Dolat Ram: a farmer and local bigwig

While working in Maal, I stayed in a little guest-room in a hospital in a nearby village called Kojawara, staffed by a colourful cast of characters including:

Dr Kishan: the gentle and intelligent old man in charge of the hospital.

Rupchand: the Doctor’s right-hand man

Aditya: the young Jain man in charge of the medicines.

The second project, working on a youth livelihood scheme, was in a small town called Delwara, where Bharti Vikas Samiti was running a number of projects, managed by the following:

Haider: my closest associate in Delwara, Haider was in charge of Bharti Vikas Samiti’s Youth Resource Centre. A gentle, somewhat naive character, he spoke quaint but limited English.

Mohan Joshi: the head of the Nagrik Vikas Manch (Bharti Vikas Samiti’s outpost in Delwara). Ambitious and business-orientated.

Kit: a well-spoken young Englishman on the fringes of hippiedom. He had already been working with Bharti Vikas Samiti for several years when I arrived.

Javed, Imtiaz and Shaheen were a trio of unofficial tour guides who would lure the millionaires staying in the local luxury hotel, Devigarh, and use their oily charm to extract monstrous tips for their services.