My research is coming along! I am so relieved to be gathering data like crazy, and I have another week of focus groups and interviews to look forward to. My research assistant and I spent the 22nd-27th in Rajasthan conducting focus groups with migrant laborers and interviews with labor contractors, parents of the laborers and others. The places we are going are very far apart, so we hire a vehicle and driver to get us around. We also have a local woman helping us since there is a combination of three languages being spoken (Hindi, Gujarati and Vagari) at any given time. This is not the Gujarati or Hindi of the classroom either. But I am managing and with the help of these two women the research is really going well. The day after tomorrow we head back to the area by bus and begin again. Hopefully we will double the number of focus groups and I have my hopes up for several important interviews to come through as well.

It seems like yesterday I felt that I would be here forever, and now the time is slipping through my fingers. I have two solid weeks of research planned, and then Sage is here for two weeks! We plan to go to all sorts of places that neither of us has ever been and then we will come back to Ahmedabad for a few days. After that I don't have much time to get a ton of research done, but I am into it now and feel confident about where it's going.

I am getting excited about life after the research, about getting back to Seattle, about the writing process, about being near everyone I love again. And I have to work really hard to keep my head here for a little while longer. That is not to say that being here is not captivating and an incredible experience filled with new ideas and more to learn than I can possibly absorb, I just miss home.

Bollywood Dreams

I am just back in Ahmedabad for a day between a bit of travel with my friend Rose and another trip to Rajasthan for research. I leave tomorrow morning at 530am for about a week in the field with my assistant. I feel totally unprepared, but deep down I know that I have been planning and thinking this through for months and that I have a pretty good idea of what I am doing. For now everything seems to be falling into place and the contacts I made on the last trip are expecting us. I am hoping to do several focus group discussions with workers and some interviews with others. I feel so grateful to have two really intelligent and energetic Indian women helping me with this work!

I spent the past few days in Bombay showing Rose around the city. On the second day we were approached on the most touristy street in the city by someone trying to cast a shot on an airplane for a Bollywood movie. We decided to go for it - what better way to get to know this city than to participate in the huge and booming local film industry for a day? We were picked up in the morning by a bus, in all 20 foreigners were rounded up. It took about an hour and half to arrive at the location - a training facility for Air India. My friend was chosen almost immediately to play a flight attendant and swept off to get dressed. A little while later I was also selected and was given an identical outfit to wear. Two other women were also dressed as flight attendants and we were all sent to have the hairstylists and makeup artists transform us. After that we sat around for several hours, until we thought for sure we would not be used after all. And then we were called to change our costumes. When we returned to the set they told me that I would have a line! I had to walk up to the two lead actors with a bouquet of flowers and say to the actress, "Mrs. Khanna, Mr. Khanna has sent these flowers for you. Have a great flight." We practiced it several times and then I did it in just one take. I'm really hoping it doesn't get edited out. Rose is behind me handing a magazine to someone. The movie is called Main aur Mrs. Khanna (Me and Mrs. Khanna) and is supposed to be coming out next month! It stars two famous Bollywood actors (Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor).

It was totally exhausting, but well worth it. We were all paid 500 rupees (10 US) and sent on our way. Rose took some amazing pictures, and I have posted two of mine until I can get some of the better ones from her.

I am relieved the holidays are over. I tried to forget about them but was mostly unsuccessful. Now, the evening of January 3rd I am finally feeling better. I have worked in the library for the past few days with my research assistant - she was doing various helpful tasks and I was fretting over my second monthly report on my research. I still have yet to finalize it and send it off to my advisor. Anyone that knows how I am about writing and deadlines can recall the torture it causes me. But I can say that the process is not as bad as it has been in the past. These reports are mostly for me, and I know that as I am working on them. They never feel finished, which causes me some stress, but they help me to see how far I have come in this project. We are also getting ready for a few interviews this week before my friend Rose arrives and I take a bit of a break.

My RA and I had a conversation after lunch today about my research. She said that since each time we meet she sees that I have developed the project further, answered questions and adapted my questions and directions she is curious to know what my project started out as. This is a very reasonable question and I think highlights both how difficult it is to know before going to the field where your work will take you and what the most interesting questions and phenomena will be, and at the same time why at least one of my committee members was concerned that I was not prepared enough to begin my work when I did. I explained what I had been planning at the time of my proposal defense and we both laughed at the huge questions I said my research would answer. I really do think that that is just the way it goes. How could I have know then about all of the fascinating changes taking place that I have only heard about since talking with people in south Rajasthan and rural areas in Gujarat?

I suppose there are some things I could have thought of in terms of what kinds of processes I wanted to look at and expected to be able to study. But it is only now that I have some context for these changes that I can understand what they might mean. For example, I had a feeling that the shift from regular hybrid seed production to Bt cotton seed production (genetically modified cotton, that is) would be resulting in some changes in patterns of labor migration, if for no other reason than that the popularity of these seeds is resulting in more production and thus a greater need for labor (ie many more people will be called to do this work). But I could not have known that this increase might be leading to social mobility for a group of men in Rajasthan that are responsible for gathering child laborers and transporting them to and from the farms in Gujarat. Now there is also heightened awareness about child labor and there is a question as to whether these middlemen will continue to make the same profits if fewer children go. I could go on and on, but this is just to say that I am learning new things all of the time, and in order to be able to theorize about why and how Bt cotton might be causing different kinds of changes I need to know a lot more about that situation!