There is no carpool lane in India but I was able to make my journey in the ‘summer summer’ of Tirupati in search on doll makers, all using the Indian carpool system. In the Indian carpool system about 15 people pile into a vehicle that is an autorickshaw cum car combined. This weird looking locomotive has a front seat for the driver with a long seat that can hold about three people. Behind the driver the rectangular vehicle has a sunroof with seating on all four sides. Each passenger sits inside the rectangle facing the other three sides. The back of the vehicle also has seats but these are reserved for young boys who can “rough it out”. The passengers who sit on the back seat allow their legs to hang loose from the vehicle, making them vulnerable to traffic. Piled into this vehicle with a carpool system, I was able to travel a total of 60km by hopping from one stop to another as I searched for the little villages and homes where the doll makers lived.

The professor at SVU had also sent a Telegu speaking student to accompany me. A very patient and observant young man, he made the perfect companion for me. He didn’t speak English very well and he didn’t understand a word of Tamil either. However he combined my broken Telegu with English and managed to find me the homes of the doll makers. By the end of my journey he became a good friend, chatting about politics to me in Telegu while I responded enthusiastically in Tamil. I am sure we were a sight to see. Infact at one the stops we made along the way we met up with a local resident of the village, a young Nurse returning from work. She spoke Telegu and Tamil and we started a three-way conversation among us. The student also showed his expertise in ethnography to me. Throughout our travels he chatted up young boys and girls from the neighborhood and enquired about where these doll makers might live and work. He was also able to find me people that would make good conversation. In ethnography, unlike in a mass-scale or statistical sample based study, people are valuable and not just numbers on a scale. One family with one unique artisan, performer, or ritual specialist, is worth more than a thousand surveys. Between my companion and I, we had struck gold. Two of several families and artisans I interviewed turned out to enrich my research in ways that only time will tell.