Ahmedabad (Gujarati: અમદાવાદ Amdāvād, Hindi: अहमदाबाद)

Alright here I am back to my blog which I'd created a few days back.. was wondering where to start.. spent a few mins thinking and then zeroed down on Ahmedabad - the place where I belong for the next 2 years!


For starters, Ahmedabad is the largest city in the state of Gujarat and situated on the banks of the river Sabarmati.. err.. well did I say river??? Think it'd be more appropriate to say what used to be a river... haha.. well atleast at the moment, all I could see of the "river" was a vast stretch of dry barren land where the localites play cricket in the couple of hours preceding the late Ahmedabad sunset!(it's usually around 8 in the night when it gets dark here.. and that definitely is very late by Indian standards!!)

And the weather here is nuthing like I'm used to - the heat here puts the Chennai summer to shame... the midday temperature's always been in the mid 40's from the day I landed here and it's 43 degrees Centigrade as I type this:-( I'm being told that it's a good 2 more weeks before the monsoon sets in and the temperature moderates a bit.. now I'm really curious to know what 'moderates a bit' is by the Ahmedabad standards.. haha..

Now that I'm done with the 'Bad' part of Ahmedabad, I'd now like to broach the 'worse' part of Ahmedabad - the traffic! It's really quite surprising to see that this place doesnt have as many vehicles on the road as you'd expect in the 7th largest urban agglomeration in India but the traffic sense of the drivers here more than makes up for the low vehicular density! In the 2 weeks I've been here, I've witnessed more than 8 accidents and what's more suprising is the people involved dont bother stopping, unless one of those involved is badly injured.. really bizarre but that's the way it works here. Last week, I'd hired an autorikshaw to drive me down to a nearby mall and to my utter disbelief the rick made contact with atleast 3 other vehicles on the way and once rammed into a car with a loud thud, but it was jus a few stares exchanged while the auto driver shrugged his shoulders and moved on!

And finally before I end, here's the 'Worst' of Ahmedabad - more than 90% of the inhabitants of Gujarat are vegetarian and understandably not many restaurants here serve meat. It took us more than a week to find a place to have our first non-veg dinner!!!

All said and done, it does look like one of those places which you dont like at first sight but eventually fall in love with... I strongly hope I'm proved right.. keep visiting this site again to know when the change takes place :-)