Word: saurashtra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Mohandas Gandhi and Dhirubhai Ambani were the two most famous scions of the Modh Bania, a Hindu commercial caste based in the arid Saurashtra peninsula of India's western Gujarat state. The Mahatma idealized traditional village ways, passive resistance, and homespun cotton. Ambani, a billionaire industrialist, preached prosperity to a burgeoning Indian middle-class via a business empire built on polyester...
Driving into Kutch, I'm unnerved by the devastation on both sides of the highway: the TV images and newspaper pictures didn't prepare me for this mutilated landscape. The epicenter of the earthquake lies in Gujarat's western-most region, where the cotton fields of Saurashtra give way to the dusty plains of the rann, an 18,000-sq-km expanse that once was a marshland on the shores of the Arabian Sea but is now practically desert. The sparse vegetation is more brown than green. This inhospitable terrain is home to the Kutchi people, former nomads renowned...
...around Bhuj. Even Tibetan refugees have pitched in. Some folks have gone overboard in their generosity. There is a surplus of used garments, sent by the truckload from all over India. Just outside Bhuj, I see an enormous pile of clothes, evidently offloaded from a passing truck. Back in Saurashtra, one NGO is still wondering what to do with a truckload of shaving kits sent by some well-meaning souls from Bombay...
After a week working for a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in rural Saurashtra, I enlist as odd-job man in a kitchen tent on the outskirts of Bhuj. Not an instinctive volunteer-type, I have no idea why I'm here, just that those images on TV and in the papers demanded more than the routine cash-and-clothes donation. But there's not much time for introspection at the kitchen, run by Girishbhai, a small businessman. We serve two meals daily to quake survivors from nearby camps, anywhere between 150 and 450 people a day. After a couple of days...
...have left Kutch, even Gujarat, to live with relatives elsewhere. Some will never return. Others are reluctant to leave the ruins of their homes. A young woman, barely out of her teens, squats by the side of the highway not far from the sea bridge that connects Kutch to Saurashtra. She has a naked baby in one arm; the other is outstretched, seeking alms. But she obviously has no experience in begging, because she's a good 10 m from the road, too far to be noticed by drivers whizzing past at 100 km/h. Passing that way a week later...