The road to Anand

One afternoon recently two colleagues and I set off for Anand, a town some 70 miles South East from Ahmedabad. My colleagues were due to speak at the Institute for Rural Development Anand, India’s top rural management and development institution. A driver had been hired and we set off in a small car, one of the ubiquitous Tata or Maruti Suzuki hatchbacks, and out through Ahmedabad’s teeming suburbs. After thirty minutes of close traffic and the bustle of brightly painted goods carriages pulling onto and off the road, their requests for ‘Horn Please OK’ picked out in a multitude of colours on rear paneling, we were onto the national highway. A toll-road, this part of the BJP government’s ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ was impressive. The road was very straight, perfectly tarmaced and with clear markings. There were even shrubs separating the opposing lanes. And every mile or so blue signs hoved into view and declared ‘National Highway A-1: A Dream Ticket’, or ‘National Highway A-1: A Real Joyride’, as well as the less optimistic ‘Speed Thrills but Kills’. The two lane road was mostly empty and the closest we came to other drivers was at the industrial looking toll booths. The best thing about the road was the embankment it had been built upon, which allowed for commanding views of the surrounding countryside.

This land was largely flat and divided into acre sized fields by lines of shrubs and trees. The fields were separated into different crops, four or five visible within 5-10 acres. One of my colleagues pointed out fields of tobacco to me and plots with castor. Every so often there was the glint of sunlight on water from a rice paddy. In between the fields there were sometimes snaking, dusty paths, but there were few people to be seen. Only occasionally a thatched hut or concrete house could be made out, standing in a beaten mud clearing or overhung with trees, and nearby would be men and women, the women in saris and men in shirts and dark trousers. There were often small, squat temples near each house, the domed roofs and square bases either cement gray or a stark white. One house had two of the distinctively shaped structures immediately opposite the front door, the backs of the mandirs to the road. Other temples were isolated, set between fields and away from any houses, perhaps as guardians of the harvest or perhaps for several families to share.

We arrived in Anand and headed for the well-maintained grounds of IRMA as dusk was falling. The campus was like a retreat; the buildings surrounded by trees and the silence of the town’s outskirts. Although nowhere as visually pleasing as Le Corbusier’s fort-like Indian Institute for Management building in Ahmedabad, IRMA has its own charm. The presentations were uneventful and we ate in the student’s canteen afterwards. On the way back to Ahmedabad, I noticed a sign lit up by the car’s headlights in the dark that read ‘Your family is waiting at home. Drive with care’.