Meenakshi Shedde: Land of Jain Chicken

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Any city that offers goti-soda gets top marks in my book. Ahmedabad has goti-soda - those lovely soda bottles with a blue marble in the neck of the glass bottle - on its highway leading to Patan, for instance. It is also the land of Jain Chicken. You guessed right - chicken without onion and garlic. Very Ahmedabad. You can also get an Ice-cream Sandwich. I haven't yet had a chance to find out if it is a true-blue ice cream sandwich, with a slab of ice cream between two slices of bread, like they have in Indonesia, which the locals eat with delight, licking the ice cream as it dribbles down the squishy bread to their elbows. The city also has a 'Passport Hanuman' temple in Khadia, packed on weekends, where you pray for your passport or visa to come through in time.

I'd been invited by Prof Kandaswamy Bharathan to lecture at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM-Ahmedabad) on "The Changing Role of Film Festivals: From Script to Screen". This was for a post-graduate management course called 'Contemporary Film Industry - a business perspective,' which he describes as the "first comprehensive course on the business of movies to be taught in business schools in the country." Previous guest lecturers include Aamir Khan, Karan Johar, and actors R Madhavan and Dhanush. The IIM campus has exhilarating, iconic buildings designed by American architect Louis Kahn, red brick buildings with enormous geometric motifs - holes, arches and rectangles in the walls that cheerfully invite light, air, the sky and trees inside the building, even as they keep the buildings cool and ventilated. The library is at the heart of a sprawling set of buildings that connects the professors' rooms, classrooms and student living quarters in one seamless space.

Travelling to Patan and Modhera, I ask the young tourist guide accompanying me, a Hindu, about 26, what he thought about the Gujarat riots of 2002, in which over 1,000 were killed, the majority of them Muslims. "The end result, peace, was good, but the means to achieve this wasn't right," he says. Their family, in the paper business, incurred losses because of the riots, as their key suppliers were Muslims. "There was a restaurant run by a Muslim near my house that was set on fire during the riots, and for six days, no one dared to even go in, take the owner's corpse out and bury it." He said Muslims mostly continued to live in the old city, and it is difficult for them to get a house in the new city, because Hindu residents will insist on giving flats only to vegetarians. But another Ahmedabad resident told me she is very pleased to see Muslims, including women, at malls and salons in the new city, and confidently mentioning their names at the doctor's, not hesitant, as they once were, to indicate their identity.

At Modhera's 11th century Sun Temple built by King Bhimdev, is the spectacular kund, a step well, with geometric patterns whose designers revelled in the shadows cast on the stone steps by the sun as it travelled across the sky. Inside the temple, the sanctum sanctorum is empty, with the main statue missing. But, on its carved pillars, there are all kinds of acrobatic amorous couples, threesomes, and gang mischief, and even a woman and animal kissing. Let me just say this is a Gujarat you won't see in the government advertisements for the state, nor will those frothing at the mouth over Padmavat, have the courage to acknowledge.

Meenakshi Shedde is South Asia Consultant to the Berlin Film Festival, award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist. Reach her at meenakshishedde@gmail.com

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