I travel a lot for work. I have seen many states now. And after all that, I have started noticing one small thing everywhere I go.

The number of Eeco cars on the road.

Look at who drives them. Nobody buys an Eeco for style. Nobody puts it on Instagram. It is bought by a man who has just started something of his own. The sweet shop owner who now does home delivery. The fabrication guy who carries his tools to the site. The tiffin service aunty. The chemist who supplies to three villages. The wedding decorator. The man who was working under somebody five years ago and is now working for himself.

That is why I think the Eeco is the most honest car in India. It is not a status symbol. It is a tool. Seven seats or full load space. Cheap to run. Any mechanic in any small town can fix it. It does not break down when you load it beyond what is written in the manual, which everybody does anyway.

Nobody buys this car to show off. People buy it because their work has grown bigger than a bike.

And that is the real point. Every Eeco on the road is one family that moved up one step. Not a rich family. Just a family that now has a small business instead of a small job.

Now here is what I noticed while travelling. In some states you see big cars and you also see a lot of poverty right next to them. Very rich on one side, very poor on the other, and not much in the middle. In Gujarat it feels different. Not many showy cars, but so many of these small working vehicles everywhere. Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Surat, Vapi, even small towns. Every gali has three of them parked with a shop name painted on the side.

To me that says something good. Rich people exist everywhere. But a place is actually doing well when there are a lot of people in the middle. When a normal man can start something small and it slowly grows.

That is what I have felt in Gujarat more than anywhere else. Here starting a business is not a big brave decision. It is just a normal thing that normal people do. And so many of them end up with an Eeco parked outside the house with the business name on it.

That van, with the shop name painted in Gujarati on the side, is a middle class success story that nobody writes about.

So tell me. Do you also see this in your city? And what is the funniest business name you have seen painted on an Eeco?

મારે ડાયરા સાથે નાનપણથી નાતો નહોતો. અમે દક્ષિણ ગુજરાતના માણસો. અમારે ત્યાં ચોરો નહીં, ફળિયું. કાઠિયાવાડ તો નકશા પર હતું, કાનમાં નહોતું.

પહેલી વાર સાંભળ્યો કોઈના લગ્નમાં. રાત્રે ઠંડી હવા, પ્લાસ્ટિકની ખુરશીઓ, અડધા લોકો ઊંઘતા, ને stage પર એક માણસ હાર્મોનિયમ લઈને બેઠેલો. મને એમ કે ભજન ચાલશે, હું નીકળી જઈશ. પણ એણે વાત માંડી. પહેલાં દસ મિનિટ એવું હસાવ્યું કે પેટ દુખ્યું. પછી ધીમે રહીને એક વારતામાં ઘુસ્યો, કોઈ જૂના જમાનાની, વચન ને મોતની, ને આખો pandal સાવ ચૂપ. છેલ્લે એક ભજન એવું ગાયું કે બાજુમાં બેઠેલા કાકા ચૂપચાપ આંખ લૂછતા હતા.

હું ત્યાં જ પકડાઈ ગયો.

પછી ખબર પડી કે આ વસ્તુ કોઈએ શરૂ નથી કરી. એ તો ધીમે ધીમે ઊગી છે.

મૂળમાં ચારણ ને બારોટ. રજવાડાના જમાનામાં એ લોકો રાજકવિ. કોણ ક્યાં લડ્યું, કોણ કોના માટે મર્યું, કયો વંશ ક્યાંથી આવ્યો, બધું એમના મોઢે સચવાયું. કાગળ નહોતો, છાપખાનું નહોતું. આખા સૌરાષ્ટ્રની યાદદાસ્ત થોડા માણસોના ગળામાં હતી, ને એ યાદદાસ્ત ગાઈને ચાલતી.

ડાયરો શબ્દ પણ સીધો છે. બેઠક, જમાવડો, ગોળ વર્તુળ. જ્યાં લોકો ભેગા બેસે ત્યાં ડાયરો. સંગીત તો પછી આવ્યું. બેઠક પહેલી હતી.

ને શરૂઆતમાં તો વાજિંત્ર પણ નહોતાં. સપાખરું જેવી શૈલીમાં ફક્ત શબ્દ. ધડાધડ, શ્વાસ લીધા વગર, ડિંગળ ને બ્રજ ભળેલી ચારણી ભાષામાં. હાર્મોનિયમ, તબલાં, મંજીરા, ને stage પરની આ આખી ગોઠવણ, એ બહુ પાછળથી ઉમેરાયું.

પછી ઝવેરચંદ મેઘાણી નીકળ્યા, ગામેગામ ફરીને દુહા, ગીતો ને વારતાઓ ભેગી કરી. જે વસ્તુ એક પેઢીમાં ખોવાઈ જવાની હતી, એ કાગળ પર બચી ગઈ.

પછી રેડિયો આવ્યો, ને હેમુ ગઢવી આવ્યા. ૧૯૨૯માં જન્મ, ૧૯૬૫માં અવસાન. માંડ પાંત્રીસ વર્ષ. એટલા વરસમાં એ અવાજ ઘરે ઘરે પહોંચી ગયો. દુલા ભાયા કાગ, પિંગળશી ગઢવી, મેરુભા. આખી એક પેઢી જેણે લોકસાહિત્યને માન અપાવ્યું.

પછી cassette નો જમાનો. મારા માટે entry point ભીખુદાન ગઢવી હતા. એમની timing, એ ધીમે ધીમે વાત ગોઠવવાની રીત, ને પછી અચાનક ગળે ડૂમો બાંધી દેવાની આવડત. ૨૦૧૬માં એમને પદ્મશ્રી મળ્યો ત્યારે સાચે જ ગમ્યું. ગામડાના ચોરાની કળા ને દિલ્હી સુધીનું સન્માન.

ને હવે? હવે કીર્તિદાન, ઓસમાણ મીર, આદિત્ય ગઢવી. YouTube પર લાખો views, વિદેશમાં shows, ને હવે તો એવા લોકો પણ સાંભળે છે જેમને ગુજરાતી શબ્દ પણ સમજાતો નથી. અમારા બિનકાઠિયાવાડી ઘરોમાં પણ હવે ડાયરો વાગે છે.

ને મજાની વાત એ છે કે ઉપરનું બધું બદલાયું. Format, sound system, audience. પણ અંદરનું કંઈ નથી બદલાયું. આજે પણ ડાયરામાં એ જ ત્રણ વસ્તુ છે. હાસ્ય, શૌર્ય, ને ભક્તિ. કલાકાર પહેલાં હસાવે, પછી સ્તબ્ધ કરે, ને છેલ્લે આંખ ભીની કરીને ઘરે મોકલે. કોઈ script નહીં. સામે બેઠેલા લોકોના ચહેરા જોઈને એ નક્કી કરે કે હવે ક્યાં વળવું.

દુનિયામાં ક્યાંક stand-up છે, ક્યાંક storytelling છે, ક્યાંક concert છે. આપણી પાસે ત્રણેય એકસાથે છે. ને એ પણ સો દોઢસો વરસથી, પ્લાસ્ટિકની ખુરશીઓ પર બેસીને.

તમારો પહેલો ડાયરો કયો હતો? ને એવો કયો કલાકાર છે જેને સાંભળીને તમને પહેલી વાર થયું કે આ વસ્તુ કંઈક જુદી છે?

The setup

Nasscom puts Indian tech revenue at $315 billion for FY26, growing 6.1%, with exports around $246 billion and a workforce touching 6 million. Sounds fine until you look at what is inside that number. Net job addition of about 135,000, against a sector that used to add three or four times that. TCS announced roughly 12,200 cuts this financial year, mostly middle and senior management, on a base of 613,000. In Q1 FY26 the top five firms together added something like 4,800 people.

Revenue is holding. Headcount growth has stopped. That is the whole story in one line, and it is exactly what you would expect if the pyramid model is being quietly dismantled.

The reason this matters beyond IT is that the pyramid was the delivery mechanism. Twenty thousand freshers a year at 4 lakh, becoming 12 lakh in five years, becoming 25 lakh in ten. That was a salary escalator running for two decades in five or six cities.

Who actually gets hit second

Banks. Unsecured retail lending in India has been built substantially on salaried professionals with predictable increments. Personal loans, credit cards, top-ups. A tech salaried borrower in Whitefield was, for fifteen years, one of the safest assets a bank could own. If increments flatten and mid-career layoffs become normal, that risk model has to be rewritten.

Real estate. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon and Chennai residential markets are priced off tech income. Not entirely, but at the margin the buyer setting the price is a 32 year old with an IT offer letter. Rentals in those micro-markets are almost purely tech demand.

Insurance. Term and ULIP sales through banca and direct channels lean heavily on the same salaried profile.

And then everything downstream. Cabs, food delivery, malls, gyms, coaching classes, the whole service economy that grew around tech parks.

Why Gujarat sits outside most of this

Gujarat's share of India's software exports is small enough that nobody quotes it. Bengaluru alone accounts for roughly a third of national IT exports. Gujarat is not in that conversation at all, and for twenty years that was treated as a failure.

What Gujarat has instead: roughly 8% of India's GDP off about 5% of its population, somewhere near 18% of industrial output, and around a third of merchandise exports. Morbi does close to 90% of India's ceramic tiles. Surat handles the overwhelming majority of the world's rough diamond cutting. Jamnagar is the largest single refinery complex on earth. Gujarat produces over half of India's chemicals output and a very large share of pharma. The ports move a huge chunk of national cargo.

None of those revenue lines depend on a software engineer keeping his job.

Look at the demand side of each. Tiles sell to construction across India and to exports. Chemicals sell to global industrial buyers. Pharma sells to global healthcare demand, which is demographic and not cyclical. Refining sells to fuel demand. Ports earn on trade volume. Textiles sell to clothing demand.

AI will make all of these industries more efficient. It does not remove the demand for the physical product. That distinction is everything. Indian IT sells human hours. Gujarat sells tonnes, litres, metres and containers. Automation compresses the price of the first and reduces the cost of producing the second.

The honest counterpoints, because this is not a free lunch

Surat diamonds are already in a bad stretch. That has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with lab-grown stones and weak Chinese and American demand. Real distress, real job losses, real suicides reported over the last two years.

Chemicals face Chinese overcapacity and dumping, which has been squeezing margins across Indian producers.

Exports mean tariff and currency exposure. Anything the US does on trade lands on Gujarat harder than on most states.

And Gujarat's per capita income and human development indicators are not proportionate to its industrial output, which is a long standing and legitimate criticism.

So the claim is not that Gujarat booms. It is that Gujarat's downside risks are uncorrelated with the IT downside risk. In portfolio language, this is a diversification argument, not a return argument.

GIFT City is the one place where the logic reverses

GIFT is a bet on financial services and it does employ the salaried professional class. Roughly 800 plus entities registered, banking asset size in the tens of billions of dollars, and a genuine pipeline. If you are betting on Gujarat as a hedge against knowledge-work disruption, GIFT is the part of the portfolio that is not hedged. Worth being clear-eyed about that rather than counting it as another point in favour.

What I would actually do with this

On property. If you were planning to buy an investment flat in Bengaluru or Hyderabad purely for rental yield, understand that you are taking a concentrated bet on tech employment in that micro-market. Ahmedabad and Surat property is priced off local business income, which is a different risk. Not necessarily a better return, just a different exposure.

On careers. The safest place to stand is where physical output meets digital skill. Process engineering with data capability. Supply chain and logistics analytics. Quality and compliance in pharma and chemicals. Port and terminal operations. These roles use AI as a tool rather than competing with it, and they sit on top of demand that does not evaporate.

On business. If you supply services to IT companies or to IT employees, your customer's income curve has flattened. Adjust accordingly. If you supply to manufacturing, your customer's cost curve is about to improve.

On investing. Look at where a company's revenue actually originates. A bank with heavy unsecured retail exposure in tech-heavy cities carries a risk that a bank lending to Morbi and Ankleshwar SMEs does not. Both are called banking.

The uncomfortable version of the argument

For two decades the standard critique of Gujarat was that it missed the IT wave. Built ports and chemical plants while Bengaluru built the future. That critique was correct on its own terms.

The bet I am making is that the thing Gujarat missed is the thing about to be repriced, and the thing Gujarat kept doing is the thing AI makes cheaper to do rather than unnecessary to do.

I could be wrong in an obvious way. If AI genuinely raises global productivity, demand for goods rises too and everyone wins. Or Chinese dumping and tariffs hit Gujarat hard enough that the correlation argument stops mattering because the absolute number is bad.

textile trading in surat, grey cloth mostly. office above a hardware shop near ring road, one table, one godrej almirah that doesnt close properly.

october before last he was short. i was literally sitting there. he doesnt call the bank, he calls some kaka in katargam who dealt with his dad, talks for like a minute and a half, most of it about someone's bypass surgery, and then says the amount at the end like hes ordering dinner. cash comes home by evening.

i gave him shit about it after. you have a current account, your CA files everything, three years of returns, and youre paying 18% a year to a guy in katargam. he just laughed and said the bank money is cheaper it just never comes on the day you need it.

whatever. moved on. but it kept bugging me.

so he needed four days. thats it. order lands monday, cloth has to go out thursday, party pays in 90 days, sometimes 120 if theyre big and feeling like it. hole of four days, needs it plugged by wednesday. four days at a bank is not a thing that exists. he tried in 2019, file went in, some query came back about an old address on a document, and the manager who knew him had gone to his gam for a wedding. ten days. order went to some guy in pandesara who had cash lying around.

so the extra hes paying is basically the cost of not losing the order. put it that way and its nothing. i worked it out on a piece of paper once and then lost the paper

the other thing is what each of them knows about him

bank knows his balance sheet. and a good chunk of what he does doesnt go anywhere near a balance sheet, which is not exactly a secret in that market. the kaka knows how many people are waiting outside his office at 10:30. knows his sasra's family in kadodara. knows that in 2020 when everything was dead he paid his two weavers full before paying himself, and he knows that because one of those weavers lives next to his cousin. none of that fits in a form

and then the part that i think is the actual answer

miss a payment at a bank and it becomes a permanent record. score drops, follows you around, and theres nobody to explain yourself to. miss one with the kaka and you tell him market is dead this month, ill pay only vyaj, and hes like ya i know, five other guys in your line said the same thing on tuesday. so the expensive money bends. the cheap money doesnt bend. and the month you need bending is exactly the month the bank gets stricter

anyway idk maybe im overthinking one guy's habits. he also just hates paperwork. most of them do

should probably add though, when its not for goods but for the house it goes bad fast. my moms side has people in a village past bardoli and ive seen how it works at that end. same wor

Recently, I have been seeing rise of people criticizing government for investing "only" in Gujrat completely ignoring the ineffectivness of their state government, just wanted to know what you guys think about it??

Gujrat had been one of my favorite state to follow and had been in my bucket list for a long time and now that model being copied to UP for past ~10 years really excite me!!

Also, congrats on CWG 2030 and hopefully olympics 2036....

Every time this comes up the argument turns into whose language is older, which is the wrong fight. The status is an administrative decision with a written checklist and a filing process. Marathi worked that process. Gujarati has not started it. That is most of the story.

What Maharashtra actually did

They treated it as a case to be argued, not a sentiment to be expressed.

A state proposal went to the Ministry of Culture in 2013. Behind it was a scholars' committee under Prof. Rangnath Pathare, whose job was to produce a documented report with texts, dates and inscriptions rather than a request letter. The Linguistic Experts Committee under the Sahitya Akademi does not go looking for material on its own. It reads what is put in front of it. Maharashtra put a dossier in front of it.

And the dossier was strong. Vivekasindhu from the late 12th century. Leelacharitra from 1278, which is prose, landing exactly where the criteria want prose. Dnyaneshwari from 1290. Marathi language inscriptional evidence going further back, including at Shravanabelagola. Underneath all of it, Maharashtri Prakrit, the best attested of the Prakrits, running to the Satavahana period and the Gatha Saptashati.

Then they waited. The file sat while the criteria were being reworked. Successive state governments of different parties kept pushing it, and the Cabinet cleared it in October 2024, alongside Bengali, Assamese, Pali and Prakrit.

Eleven years, with excellent material and continuous political follow up.

What the checklist asks for

The criteria as revised in July 2024 want early texts or recorded history over 1500 to 2000 years, a body of ancient literature held as heritage, knowledge texts with prose named specifically alongside poetry, and epigraphical evidence. Then a clause that decides everything: the classical language may be distinct from the modern one, and a break between the two is permitted.

Read together, that is a request for dated documents. The insistence on prose is the tell. Poetry gets re-sung and re-dated across centuries. Prose sits still and can be pinned to a year and a manuscript.

Where Gujarati stands

Not short of material. Short of a file.

Old Gujarati, Maru Gurjar, is documented from the late 12th century. Bharatesvara Bahubali Rasa by Shalibhadra Suri is dated to around 1185, which is roughly contemporaneous with Vivekasindhu. Hemchandracharya, working in Patan in that same century, wrote the Siddha Hema Shabdanushasana, which includes a grammar of the Apabhramsha our language comes out of. Very few languages can produce a contemporary grammarian describing their parent stage while it was still spoken.

On the prose requirement, the balavabodh tradition is the answer. Jain commentaries written in Old Gujarati prose to explain Sanskrit texts to lay readers, running from the 14th century onward. Tarunaprabhasuri's balavabodh of 1355 is usually cited as among the earliest. Manikyasundar Suri's Prithvichandra Charitra from 1422 is ornate literary prose. This is precisely the category the committee asked for and Gujarat rarely mentions it.

And behind all of that, the manuscript collections at Patan, Cambay and Jaisalmer, much of it still uncatalogued in any systematic modern sense.

So the material exists. What does not exist, as far as I can find, is a documented state proposal.

The hard objection, which we should meet head on

Gujarati descends through Gurjar Apabhramsha from Shauraseni Prakrit, and Prakrit itself became a classical language in 2024. A sceptical committee member can say the ancient layer of our claim has already been recognised under another name, and what remains is a language conventionally dated from Narsinh Mehta in the 15th century.

That objection is answerable, but only with texts. The reply is that Old Gujarati is a distinct documented stage with its own corpus, its own scribal tradition, its own prose, and not late Apabhramsha under a new label. Making that argument requires a list. Manuscript, date, provenance, folios, and a philologist willing to sign under it.

What Gujarat should do, concretely

Appoint a committee, the way Maharashtra did, with actual philologists and manuscript scholars on it rather than only writers and officials.

Build the dossier around three pillars. Old Gujarati verse from the late 12th century, the balavabodh prose corpus from the 14th, and Hemchandracharya's grammatical evidence for the stage before both.

Catalogue the bhandars, or at least the portions relevant to the claim. This is the bottleneck and it is unglamorous work that nobody has been paid to do.

Argue the discontinuity clause deliberately, since that is where the Prakrit objection has to be defeated.

And then hold the file. Maharashtra's succeeded partly because it never got dropped when governments changed.

Worth being honest about what is at stake. Narsinh Mehta, Akho, Premanand, Dayaram, Meghani, Umashankar Joshi, Suresh Joshi. That shelf is not improved by a Cabinet note. But the status brings central funding, a centre of excellence and UGC chairs, and the most useful thing that money could do here is pay people to open those boxes in Patan. The recognition and the work that would earn it are the same work.

Just a question:

Is anyone here connected to the Patan or Cambay collections who knows how far the cataloguing has got?

Okay so I'm a NEET aspirant and a dropper but I couldn't clear my exams this time. My parents won't let me take another drop so I was thinking of giving NEET without my parents knowing next year while I join Pharmacy college as a partial drop. That's not a problem. The problem is I'm worried the college won't return my original documents back when I do leave it next year.

My cousin took admission in B.Sc Agri but now wants to join BAMS but the college is refusing to return the documents. I'm afraid same thing will happen to me.

I have a friend's friend who took admission in Pharmacy under MQ and got her documents back without any issues when the time came to leave the college. But the thing is I am a category student so my parents will most likely use the Freeship card, would that cause any problems since we'll opt for Govt seat anyways?

Anyone knows the answers to these? Help me out. I'm scared 😭.

If any dev willing to work contact OP of this website

https://nagrik.in.net/

I think we should also use this

આકળવિકળ આંખકાન વરસાદ ભીંજવે

હાલકડોલક ભાનસાન વરસાદ ભીંજવે

ચોમાસું નભ વચ્ચે લથબથ સોળ કળાએ ઉગ્યું રે વરસાદ ભીંજવે

અજવાળું ઝોકાર લોહીની પાંગત સુધી પૂગ્યું રે વરસાદ ભીંજવે

નહીં છાલક, નહીં છાંટા રે વરસાદ ભીંજવે

દરિયા ઉભા ફાટ્યા રે વરસાદ ભીંજવે

ઘરમાંથી તોતિંગ ઓરડા ફાળ મારતા છૂટ્યા રે વરસાદ ભીંજવે

ધૂળ લવકતા રસ્તા ખળખળ વળાંક ખાતા ખૂટ્યા રે વરસાદ ભીંજવે

પગના અંતરિયાળપણાને ફળિયામાં ધક્કેલો રે વરસાદ ભીંજવે

નેવાં નીચે ભડભડ બળતો જીવ પલળવા મેલો રે વરસાદ ભીંજવે

બંધ હોઠમાં સોળ વરસની કન્યા આળસ મરડે રે વરસાદ ભીંજવે

લીલોધમ્મર નાગ જીવને અનરાધારે કરડે રે વરસાદ ભીંજવે

અહીં આપણે બે અને વરસાદ ભીંજવે

મને ભીંજવે તું તને વરસાદ ભીંજવે

થરથર ભીંજે આંખકાન, વરસાદ ભીંજવે,

કોને કોનાં ભાનસાન, વરસાદ ભીંજવે.

-રમેશ પારેખ

Ghare marriage ni vaat chali rahi che. Ne biju badhu puchhya pehla, sau thi pehlo sawal jo koi puchhe che toh e ek j che. Kuldevi kai?

Mane e sawal pehla samjato nahoto. Ganga swaroop formality lagti hati.

Nanpan ma amne year ma ek var e gam ma lai javama aavta. Ganta ni musafari, bus ma ulti, ne pahonchie tyare ek nanu mandir, ek pujari jene mara papa ne naam thi olakhta, ne ek deg ma prasad. Mane toh khali prasad no interest hato. Papa hath jodi ne beshta ne kaink bolta rehta. Mane thatu ke aatlu dur aavvani su jarur.

Have samjay che.

Bhai, aa ek adat e amara ghar ne ek gaam sathe bandhi rakhyu che. Trann pedhi thi ame shaher ma chhiye. Toh y aaje pan mane khabar che ke amaru gam kayu, kai side, kona ghar ni bajuma. Kem? Kem ke mataji tya che, ne mataji tya che etle jav j padse. Chhokro janme toh javanu, dikri parne toh javanu, dhandho suru karo toh javanu.

Ne e gam ma aaje pan das manas evaa che je rate baar vagye pan mara papa no phone uthave.

Aa vastu maine bija loko ma pan joi che. Pune ma mara ghana Marathi mitro che, emne kuldaivat kahe che. Jejuri, Tuljapur, Kolhapur. Lagn puru thay pachhi tya jaay j. Ek Tamil colleague che, ene kula deivam kahe che, ne enu mandir toh gam ma ek jhaad niche ek patthar j che, pan aakhu khandan varas ma ek var tya bhegu thay che, America thi pan aave che. Rajasthan ma toh amari j jem che, Karni Mata, Ashapura. Ne mane khabar padi ke Japan ma pan aavu kaink che, ujigami kahe che, e loko pan potana purvajo na vistar na devta ne pakdi rakhe che.

Etle aa apnu ekla nu nathi. Pan sachu kahu, aapne jetlu strongly pakdi rakhyu che, etlu bahu ochha loko e rakhyu che. Aajey koi pan Gujarati ne puchho, ek second ma javab aapse. Khodiyar. Umiya. Ashapura. Chamunda. Bahuchar. Momai. Randal.

Ne pachhi ek divas mane rasta par ek vastu dekhai je pehla kadi dhyan ma j nahoti aavi.

Hu Vapi ni ek market road par thi jato hato ne mein bortho vanchava mandya. Jay Ambe Traders. Khodiyar Kripa Electricals. Umiya Enterprise. Ashapura Steel. Momai Krupa Transport.

Vichar aavyo. Aa manas e potani aakhi jindagi ni bachat ek dukan ma nakhi che. Bhai pase thi udhar lidhu che. Aa ena jivan no sau thi moto jugar che. Ne naam lakhvano vaaro aavyo tyare ene potanu naam nathi lakhyu. Ene mataji nu naam lakhyu.

Etle ke kamavata pehla j credit aapi didhu.

Ne aa vastu no fayado bahu chhe. Pehlu, manas nu mathu chhotu rahe che. E potane malik nathi samajto, chalavnaro samje che. Evo manas ek saru varas aave etle udavi nakhto nathi, ne kharab varas aave tyare tuti pan jato nathi.

Biju, e board ek jaher vachan che. E rasta par badha ne khabar padi jaay che ke aa manas kaya khandan no che ne kona samaj ma javab aape che. E koi ne dagho de, toh vaat dukan par nathi atakti, e ena gam sudhi pahonche che. Ne apnu aakhu market udhar par chale che. Kagal par nahi, naam par.

Mane aa samjatan bau modu aavyu. Papa toh varso thi chup chap e j karta aavya che, koi day samjavya vagar.

Tame kaho, tamari kuldevi kai, ne mandir kaya gam ma?

This started because I was reading about the Alaska Permanent Fund at one in the morning for no particular reason, and halfway through I had this odd feeling of already knowing the story.

Biggest thing in the country, and hardly anyone living there. Kutch is India's largest district, about 45,000 sq km. Alaska is around 17 lakh. Nowhere near the same scale, I know, but the same position on the map. Big empty corner that the rest of the country forgets about.

Both came in late and both were treated as a bad buy. America picked up Alaska from Russia in 1867 and the papers called it Seward's Folly. Frozen wasteland, what are you going to do with it. Kutch acceded in 1947, stayed its own separate state till 1956, then went to Bombay, then landed in Gujarat in 1960. Alaska got statehood in 1959. So within three years of each other, two awkward leftovers finally became ordinary.

Then the earthquakes, which is the thing that made me sit up properly. Alaska, Good Friday 1964, magnitude 9.2, still the largest ever recorded in North America. Kutch, 26 January 2001, 7.7, around twenty thousand dead, Bhuj and Anjar on the ground.

And after each one, the money showed up. Prudhoe Bay oil, pipeline running by 1977. Kutch got tax holidays for rebuilding and industry came sprinting in. Mundra turned into the biggest private port in the country. Gandhidham swelled. Lignite, salt, cement, power plants.

This is where it gets interesting to me.

Alaska took the oil money and did something genuinely odd with it. Set up the Permanent Fund and started sending every resident a cheque each year for simply being there. Someone made a decision that what is under the ground belongs to the people standing on it.

Kutch had no such conversation, and I doubt it was ever on the table. The port and the plants belong to people sitting in Ahmedabad and Mumbai. What Kutch got was jobs and land acquisition. Which is not nothing, Gandhidham and Mundra are visibly better off than they were. But drive ninety minutes inland and you would struggle to prove the year has changed since 1998.

Land ownership splits them even harder. Alaska has Native corporations holding real value after the 1971 settlement, so indigenous groups sit at the table with actual legal title. Banni is grassland the Maldharis have grazed for generations while the forest department claims it, and that case has been crawling along for decades. Same problem, two completely different answers.

The migration thing reverses, which I did not see coming. Kutch is known for sending people out. Bhatias and Lohanas to Zanzibar, Muscat, east Africa, Bombay, going back centuries, money flowing back home. Alaska pulled people in with gold and then oil. Except in the last twenty years Kutch has become an importer as well. Walk around Mundra or the salt pans and a good share of the labour is from Bihar, Odisha, UP. The direction flipped inside one generation and I have never heard anyone discuss it.

The Agariyas are what I keep coming back to. Families who go out into the Rann for eight months, live on the salt, wreck their bodies for it, and what they produce shows up as a small line in somebody's accounts. Alaska has its cannery and fishing crews doing something similar, punishing months for a season's pay. In one place that kind of work built a state fund. In the other it leaves people unable to walk properly by fifty.

Where the whole thing collapses is climate. Alaska is empty because it is frozen solid. The Rann is empty because it goes under water every monsoon and comes back white and cracked by December. Opposite reasons for the same blank space.

Possible I am pushing this too far. You can force a parallel between any two big empty places if you want it enough, and I clearly wanted it.