Last evening I drove to Heidelberg. I’d spent the morning alone; Wife had moved to Brussels a couple of days ago, and I guess I wasn’t used to the emptiness yet, having spent the last two months together. The sun came out late afternoon, and the drive along B3 took me through empty meadows and clear views of the nearby hills. I parked at P4 and walked to the riverside. As always, the view was beautiful. I took some pictures from the bridge, and then walked along Hauptstrasse, stepping into every bookstore that came my way, to look at the English sections inside. As I walked the length of the street I found myself immersed in the surroundings: snatches of conversations in German, people dressed elegantly in various styles and shapes, bakeries with a warm glow within, trendy hairdressing saloons, expensive watch showrooms, the corner selling vintage signboards, the painter sketching portraits. At the end of it I felt as if I’d always be in love with this place – its gloss would never fade, it would never stop being interesting.

I couldn’t immediately explain why I felt that way. Perhaps it was because the foreignness of this place would always remain, because it was so different from the world I’d grown up in. The dullness that comes with familiarity had not set in, and I wondered if I’d ever feel so familiar with these surroundings as not to notice them.

Why had I not grown familiar with my surroundings? Since six years I’ve walked the same route to office through the cobble-stoned streets and corn fields and yet, last week as I was walking one morning along the same path observing the landscape partly obscured by mist, I felt that this was a view I had not experienced yet – there was a newness to it that I could attribute only to the weather: everything else was the same. The weather here induces dramatic changes in one’s environment – not just the landscape, but the clothes people wear, the cars they drive, the spring in their step and the hope in their voice – and that is one reason why one cannot easily grow too familiar with the surroundings.

Actvity is another reason. It is a culture that encourages – and rewards – doing things, filling up your day with “life-enhancing” activities. A colleague I had lunch with the other day was telling me about his eleven year old daughter who was learning the piano, taking karate lessons, experimenting with drawing and using her spare time to create Power-point presentations. At work things have been mostly dynamic for me, and what little spare time I get quickly fills up with one activity or another. There is no time to feel bored and no cause to blame familiarity; six years have passed by in a flash.

Language perhaps plays a role as well. Although I can understand a fair amount of German, my expertise has not reached a level where I can understand it all and immerse myself fully into the culture. This keeps things unfamiliar, keeps me curious and puzzled.

Then there’s cross-cultural variety. Across the border people speak a tongue I cannot understand and do things that surprise me now and then; the architecture reveals new elements of aesthetics and engineering; the signs on the road take a while to get used to, and the traffic (in)discipline keeps me guessing; getting vegetarian food – asking for it – remains a challenge.

Even if I were to grow familiar with it all one day, Europe will not lose its charm. This strikes me while watching movies that show Europe in the previous decades, like Steven Spielberg’s Munich: the essence of that Europe of the Sixties and Seventies still remains, and will continue. I am unable to define what is behind that charm, what creates it; perhaps I shall take that topic another day.

There were three rows of tin-roofed shacks, arranged irregularly but spaced apart. Small outlines of men, women and children were moving about. I stood for a while and watched them carry on their lives; it felt like observing a small society placed in a glass cage – an ethnographer’s dream, perhaps.

I was in the balcony of my sister’s apartment on the eighth floor of a high-rise building in Bangalore. In the distance, large campuses of high-tech companies dominated the view along with grey shapes of hollow structures under construction. Closer still, what initially appeared like empty, barren land revealed short columns of concrete sprouting from the ground. The city’s relentless push for growth was plainly visible.

But I was more interested in the patch of land next to the apartment. Here, one part was occupied by the basti – a colony inhabited by people working in the large building construction projects nearby. It had been setup recently – the tin roofs looked new – and was clearly a temporary arrangement: once the projects completed the shacks would be dismantled and moved elsewhere, next to yet another building under construction.

Yet, people down there seemed to have settled in a manner that gave little indication that their stay was provisional. Wires strung on bamboo poles brought electricity to the homes. A water tank had been constructed nearby, and this open tank served as the colony’s water source. Like animals in a jungle gravitating towards a water hole, people of the colony regularly walked the short distance to the tank.

A little away from the tank, a man sat washing his clothes.

The water from this spot flowed and collected in a stagnant pool a little away.

Near one of the shacks, a barber was at work.

In another open patch children were playing with mud. Next to them, a small girl was washing vessels while two others were writing on a slate.

In between the rows of shacks there was periodic activity. A man squatting on the ground was holding a plate and eating his morning meal, while a woman – probably his wife – sat nearby, tying her hair.

Behind, in another row, a man was hanging clothes on a line spanning the two rows.

Nearby, a lady poured water into an aluminum vessel.

Far away from the colony, at the edge of the empty plot, I saw a man squatting. There was a small pot of water next to him.

I stood there entranced, watching and photographing the people below. The view made me wonder if anyone had studied a small, closely-knit group of people from such a height. An ethnographer usually spends time living in the society she wishes to study, which enables her, through close observation of people and their interactions, to construct a detailed picture of how that society functions. From this height the intention would be different: she could, by looking at the “big picture” and capturing patterns or clusters of behavior, gather aspects that would not be immediately visible from within. For instance, the dynamics around the water tank seemed an interesting candidate for observation: who from which household came to collect water? How often, and at what times? What was the water used for? What would happen if the water supply was drastically reduced – how would the collection and usage behavior change?

If there were meaningful patterns here, they would lead to questions that could be answered by going into the colony and living there – so such observation from a height could serve as a precursor of a detailed study from within.

I had only a day in Bangalore, which left me less than half an hour to observe this microcosm after I discovered it in the morning. My sister couldn’t see the point in my excitement – she was tired of the construction happening all around and wished it would soon end. Perhaps, I thought, someone else in the apartment block had seen the basti and gotten excited enough to jot down the happenings down there. Someone who would discover early enough that she had a passion for anthropology, and would dedicate her first book to “the colony-dwellers who inspired me into the field of study of human cultures.”