Blog Archives
Animals in Nathupur village- Adorable & funny!
The focus of my fieldwork in Nathupur village is people, their stories, their experiences, their lives, their aspirations and disappointments and their physical conditions of living. It’s a fascinating checkerboard of ever-expanding scope, facets within facets and many hidden nuances I sense I need to dig into to really understand the churnings of life as a migrant and life as a landlord, those being the two overarching actors I intend to study.
Relatively simple and equally interesting, however, are the non-human inhabitants of the village. Ubiquitous, animals stare at you, lie in your way and follow you around. Villagers love them and domesticate them, ignore them and co-exist with them. I find it really amusing and here are a few clicks to share the hilarity of these creatures with you!
One little monkey….sitting on a wall…
The whole picture!
Bhaainns! They are everywhere, placidly chewing away…
Or lazing away….
And of course, the stray dogs…
Ghodas too…a few homes have well groomed horses…
And gadhas….the man on the donkey thought I was crazy, taking a picture of him and his beast of burden
This one takes the cake! Chooze! These little chicks were being kept by a migrant family in a bucket in their one-room tenement. During the day, they took them up on the roof and left them in the chicken coop for a while…
Heritage under your nose: Observations from Nathupur Village, Gurgaon
My first few visits to Nathupur village were way back in 2004-05 when we drove there all the way often to eat at Italiano’s. At the time, I recognized that this urban village adjacent to posh DLF Phase 3 had the potential to be for Gurgaon what Hauz Khas village is for Delhi today, a place full of boutique shops and eateries, an exotic locale with an earthy feel. I did not know then what lay inside.
In a few years, DLF Cyber City mushroomed in the vicinity. Along with the millions of square feet of office space, came a demand for residences for low-income workers who did not have the options of commuting from afar and Nathupur (along with Sikanderpur and Chakkarpur) became the default absorbers of this burgeoning population of migrants coming in to tap this new opportunity for work.
My later visits to Nathupur were more related to this new economic reality. At one point, we tried to look for office space here for Minerva in a bid to be located closer to some of our clients. At another point, I had a frustrating encounter with a placement agency for domestic help located here. I then perceived Nathupur as a messy warren of human habitation, dense and disorganized.
Today, as I explored Nathupur in the company of team members from Agrasar, an NGO working to assist migrants in Gurgaon, these disparate perceptions came together in a climactic realization of Nathupur as a hapless victim of rapid urbanization and changing realities. In the part of the village where we conducted our community interactions today, I saw strewn many stately old havelis, rock solid and beautiful. I saw proud villagers inhabit old homes fashioned in a colonial style. I also saw the old homes half knocked down, making way for higher builder-style construction that would house migrant families, shops and businesses. Amid the buffalo-ridden lanes of this clearly old village, change was evident. The few who are clinging on to their old life of open space and rural habits (we saw women drying grain in the sun, men smoking hookahs and chatting) would be eventually outnumbered. But for now, these older homes in the context of rapid change seem like moments snatched out of a tornado of sweeping transformation.
I am wondering if it would be possible to preserve some of this older lifestyle and architecture. Some sort of adaptive re-use perhaps?
ramblinginthecity 