(Obviously we meet innumerable people in our travels, not all of whom get directly mentioned, but their thoughts, their help, shall always be remembered. I wanted to make a special mention of some.)

Ethnography comes with its perks as well and one of those major bonuses is friendship. Apart from our interlocutors (for me the doll-makers) there are many unforgettable faces I befriended along the way. It is not serious all the time. Big or small, rich or poor, every person I have met in my lonesome travels has become a friend. The big hearts that people seem to have all around the smallest of villages never fails to baffle me. My parents being their usual careful selves had warned me not to trust anyone as I was a single female travelling alone. My best friends cautioned me about the young men who may predate upon my single self. I too experienced at least two unfortunate encounters that spoke to the fears of my well-wishers. But far from the maddening crowd, there have been people I could trust and people who opened their hearts and towns up to me asking for nothing in return and for this I feel blessed and fortunate. Instead of sleazy men, I found helpful young and old men and women who showed me the way, took me to the right spots, and answered my weird questions about places and things. They happily relinquished their stereotype to share this journey with me.

To them I have to dedicate this post. As I left the state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) two weeks ago back to my home turf of Chennai, I left with a heavy heart and many memories of spicy food, hot sweaty bus rides, and gaily colored temples, churches and mosques. AP was vastly new territory for me. I have conducted fieldwork in India before and I have travelled to several major cities in India but AP, its towns, its language, its food, and its people were new to me. I even recall an earlier post where I mentioned that temple customs were different and locals didn’t hesitate to tell me do things differently in a shrine. Something I wasn’t used to people telling me a Hindu was how to act in a Temple, where I thought I was comfortable doing my own routine. This was my first lesson and I learned it at the Kalahasti Temple near Tirupati, an early visit on my journey up north. Among the many things I learned, I also learned about AP and its brand of friendship – a kind of tough love!

My first friends came from SVUniversity at Tirupati where Professors retired and current came to visit me and tell me the things they knew about dolls. The candid honesty about the doll-makers prepared me for the wealth of obstacles I would face before I could find even one doll-maker or someone willing to tell me about them. It was here too that I had my first plate of Chilly Paneer for this trip, an Indian-Chinese delicacy, must try if you like fried spicy cottage cheese.

I met my first fieldwork assistant as well in Tirupati, Thinappa, a man with a golden heart. Thinappa, a Telegu speaking student at the university had graciously accepted to join me on my travels to the local villages and help me navigate the various people and their towns. Frankly only one doll maker didn’t speak a word of Tamil and that’s where I required Thinappa’s help the most. But along the way, in our broken tongues – between Telegu, Tamil, and English – we became good friends and I learned about how sociologists in India do their work in a very relevant place, where everything they study matters to the world they live in directly. Here in western academia, we bring non-Indian voices and priorities to the forefront of our analyses of India’s problems, but in Thinappa’s classroom, every data that was collected fed directly back into the system. He researches the re-association of juvenile delinquents in Tirupati’s jails back into society. His hometown, several districts away was struggling to curtail the repeat offences of juvenile delinquents.

In Vizag, I met a different kind of crew. My loyalties were divided between Prasanna Ma’am, a local English professor and Tribal studies expert and her family and friends, and my serviced hotel folks and their local driver cum guide. Both taught me invaluable things about AP’s landscape, its people, and their values. I wrote about Prasanna Ma’am in an earlier post but I didn’t mention my guide Vijay who took me to the most picturesque spots of Vizag and temples nestled away in hill tops with spectacular beaches. I didn’t miss Hawaii for even a moment.