[Reader-list] I-Fellow posting

[L. Simhan]

  This is our extremely late, second posting. But here is what we've been up to over the past few months.

 
        Over the course of three weeks during the month of May we talked with eleven street vendors in New Delhi. Most of these conversations took place in or around Nehru   Place, Hanuman  Temple, and Jama Masjid. We talked to men who worked in the following professions: Cobbler, Key Maker, Ear Cleaner, Forehead Reader, fruits/vegetable sellers, Medicine Man, Sweets Seller, Goatskin water Seller , Tattooist, Barber, Astrologer.


In almost every case people were sort of warily happy to talk about their work, in many cases we learned a something about the technical side of these trades, though much of the knowledge seemed amorphous and not easily explained, and occasionally we got a sense of a person's character or personality. 
    
What didn't work well in these conversations was primarily a function of language difficulties and time. As neither of us are very good at Hindi, a friend of our's generously offered to accompany us and assist in these conversations. Unfortunately, this also brought the size of our group to three people, which in addition to our note taking, made these conversations seem a little more formal, and turned the whole thing into a bit more of a spectacle, than we would have liked. Additionally, had we talked to less people, but talked several times with them, we undoubtedly would have been able to have gone into the technical side of the professions in greater detail.


    So we now have a body of research; consisting of our visual and written notes, and we have spent the last month trying out different approaches towards working  this 'data' into comic book form. Given the research based nature of the fellowship we initially kept feeling pulled into taking a journalistic, or even sociological angle towards the comic book, though neither of us felt quite natural in those shoes, especially when trying to express our findings graphically. Our initial interest in this project stemmed for a desire to learn more about these informal professions and how they survived, which was somewhat successful. 

So, after several false starts, we are currently approaching the project much more loosely. Rather than build a strict encyclopedic format which we then try to cram each street vendor into, we are attempting to build different stories, whose structures come out of the individual conversations.
    
Jacob & Lakshmi

  
 		
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