India-Pakan World Cup game gets global gaze on Ahmedabad, the city of contradictions | Cricket-world-cup News

Ajay Choudhary swivels in his chair in his large office room at Shahibaug in Ahmedabad. He is one of India’s leading abstract-painting arts, who has exhibited his work in Paris, New York. He is also the joint-commissioner of police. On October 14, the city will host the most anticipated game of the World Cup; nothing else, unless India and Pakan meet again in the final at the same venue, is going to flutter the heartbeats as much. Not just the game, but the city itself has been caught in the Indo-Pak chatter.The former PCB chairman Najeem Sethi had set the cat among the pigeons when he said he wouldn’t like Pakan to play India at Ahmedabad. Interpretations and curiosity abounded: Was it because of the perception of the city after the 2002 riots? Was it because it’s the home state of the prime miner Narendra Modi? Not just Pakan, even in a few places in India, Ahmedabad conjures a certain stereotype: business-money-minded Gujaratis who snack in the streets in the moonlit nights, the riots of course, and a city seen as a disembodied voice of capitalism, almost soul-less.
Choudhary, the art who enforces law, smiles. The young students at National Institute of Design, country’s premier design institute started Mallika Sarabhai, laugh. The owner’s son at the ramshackle street side eatery at a congested artery in the muslim neighbourhood of Bhatiyar Gully thumps the table in laughter. A NID faculty, in her 50’s, sighs about how her city has changed. We first turn to Choudhary, born in Bihar in the 70’s to middle-class parents who played cricket with friends who don’t hesitate to “use their knives tucked in their wa”, and who had the deep urge to go beyond himself at work and go within himself in his passion for art.

We are here in Ahmedabad! 👋#CWC23 | #TeamIndia | #INDvPAK | #MeninBlue pic.twitter.com/dVuOaynYRN
— BCCI (@BCCI) October 12, 2023
He has been busy at work, ahead of the big game. “There are 75 communal pockets in this city with its 1.5 crore population. For a while now, we have senior officers in charge of them; patrolling is being done. We have separate bandobast for the stadium and team hotels. Another system for the rest of the city during the next few days.” Just not the streets but in the cyber world too. “We have picked up a person who had issued threats”. The threat to Ahmedabad, not just because of this game, comes from many quarters, he says. “From Lashkar-e-Toiba, from Afghanan and Pakan-based terrors, from Khalan groups as well. The reasons are multifold – the prime miner is from this state, this is one of the most prosperous cities, and there are other reasons too.” Choudhary sips his chai.
A cup of chai steams on the table, a fat art book which hosts in its pages a stirring ‘white-on-white’ art tribute to Gandhi’s ahimsa with lacerations on its surface that denotes “wounds in the people’s mind who deviate from that path, us the people”. Choudhary leans forward.
“There are 18 thriving art galleries in Ahmedabad.” Eighteen, he re-stresses. “How many cities have this culture?”
A riverfront city with 75 communal spots and 18 sacred places for art, and Gandhi’s ashram, a city of contradictions.
Choudhary slips into a lovely anecdote about Le Corbusier, the French architect who designed Chandigarh and who was enticed to come to Ahmedabad in 1952 the mayor to construct a few buildings. “He built seven glorious structures, check out his ‘Atma’, that’s the office of the textile mill owners association.” Once, the textile mills dotted the city, flooding in money, trade, and fabric that wrapped around the world.

Touchdown Ahmedabad 🛬
📹 Capturing the journey, featuring a surprise in-flight celebration 🤩#CWC23 | #DattKePakani | #WeHaveWeWill pic.twitter.com/qxe0mO9p8X
— Pakan Cricket (@TheRealPCB) October 11, 2023
The Atma indeed is a thoughtfully done three-floored structure. Grand pillared halls, elaborate facades to keep out sun from scorching the insides, but it’s the story that’s amusing. Apparently, when he took the tour of the city, Corbusier would often lie down on the ground, and when the puzzled onlookers, that included a 25-year old Balkrishna Vithaldas Joshi, considered the father of Indian architecture, dared to enquire over dinner, he said, “I was using my height and body to get a measure of the breath of the roads and the feel for the place.” Choudhary laughs in the retelling of the story told to him Joshi. “A true original, he was, but also tells us how..
At Paldi, in the South Western part of the city, the 20-year old Madhumati from Nagpur, flashes a smile from her design table at a cosy corner in the leafy campus of NID. Downstairs, past the roomy workshop spaces and down a spiral wrought-iron staircase, the 18-year old Shree Abhirami from Chennai, smiles shyly. Kinjal from Bhopal, Sana from Kerala – the campus is 60-40 in favour of the women – all jump in with their views on the city.
“Super-sweet people,” Madhumati says, “they love their bun-maska here; every place thinks they are unique, despite it being just bread and butter – but remarkably they do taste different”. “They don’t have any problem even if I can’t speak in the local language,” says Abhirami (“please include Shree when you write my name”) who is from Chennai, which detests the imposition of Hindi. “Food is great,” says Kinjal.
A riverfront city with 75 communal spots and 18 sacred places for art, and Gandhi’s ashram, is tasked with putting on a hospitable show and let cricket’s greatest rivalry take centrestage.(PTI)
Not far from the campus is the Sardar Bridge and some NIDians view it as a boundary marker of two different worlds. All of them, including a faculty lady, make a point about how safe the city is for women. “I have moved around at nights on my scooter for years, absolutely no problem. I can’t think of many such cities in the country.” That’s a huge factor, say the students.
Dr Shilpa Das, a senior faculty, slips into nostalgia for her childhood. “That cricket stadium never exed of course. There was nothing but beautiful eucalyptus trees all around that area.In the 60’s and 70’s, a sense of Gandhian life did ex, quite simple living in middle-classes. Then things started to change post liberalisation.”
She addresses the lingering after-effects of the riots. “Before that, you could see individual Muslim families spread across. No longer. Post that, most moved encase to Juhapura, along the national highway. Even some of my friends. They don’t obviously like it there; as it’s an urban ghettoisation, right. But that’s the effect, lines are drawn after such a cataclysmic event.” She then talks about how there were just two restaurants that served non-vegetarian food in the 70’s, the lack of bookshops, and the surface-level knowledge of the millennials. “NID was truly avant-garde during its inception. In their soul, in their character. These days, I sense some conservatism in youngsters internally, here and around the city.”
Enjoy Navrathiri and Eid
The students talk about how they enjoy all the festivals that the city celebrates in spectacular style. A Jain boy from Pune, who says his parents were thrilled with the city for its cuisine and festivals, says, the festivities are ‘amazing really, be it navrathiri or Eid’. Otherwise, it can be a bit boring for us students. No fancy places, clubs, activities but during festivals, and also during college-fests, the city becomes something else.”
Kavish, from Bangalore, talks about how he desperately tried but couldn’t snaffle any tickets for the game. Same sentiments from other students. Plans are being made to watch it in the lounge area. It’s a boarding college, the students live in the campus, dotted canteens and hang-outs. “That’s BMW, an open-air eatery inside; ‘Behind Mechanical Workshop’ is the prosaic explanation.
A view of a tattoo on woman’s back drawn in preparations for the upcoming Navratri in Ahmedabad, India, October 12, 2023. (Reuters)
Outside away from the real BMWs that whizz across the town, the eateries at Bhatiyar gully in the old city wakes up in the nights, just around the corner from the ethereally lit ‘Lal Darwaja’ that houses the Sidi Saiyyed Mosque famed for its ten-stone latticework jaalis on its rear arches with tree-shaped designs, built in 1573, the last year of the Gujarat Sultanate.
Maahil, the young son of the owner, sits in the gullies of the ‘ZK Fry & Moglai’, a street side eatery. A few wooden benches are scrambled around plastic tables on the road. Over a plate of Kheema khichdi and mutton bhuna, with buttered rotis, Maahil starts flashing his phone. “Dekhiye, Taj ka rate: 1 lakh 20 thousand for a night. He yells to the man sweating over the fire tenderising the meat, ‘apna chaar-raasta hotel hai na, haan voh, tees hazaar ek raat ke liye.” The meat slips out of the rod, the cook’s jaws slip away from the teeth, “kamaal hai!” Maahil announces grandly, “sab cricket ke liye’.
The chat veers to the sensitive subjects around religion and riots. “Voh sab ab nahi bhai, Inshallah. I can’t say what’s inside the mind of people, whether they have just put a lid on it, dakh-ke band kar diya ki nahi, but people of my age all just want a good life without any tension. Youth of all religions come here to eat. Mutton Bhuna pey complaint karenge, mere mazhab pey nahi. Sorry sorry, no one complains about the Bhuna here,” and he laughs.Most Read
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The chat veers to the mahoul, the atmosphere in the city for the big match. “India will win bhai. One-and-half lakh people packed at the stadium shouting, I can’t see how Pakan will handle that pressure. But the Pakan team won’t have any problem outside the stadium.

“Take the players of the two teams, itself. Did you see how Shaheen Afridi gifted something to Bumrah for his ba? Did you see how Babar Azam respects apna Virat Kohli? King hai king. They all have such fun, share friendship.”
On a moonlit night, Maahil has the last word. “Some people might talk rubbish but kuch bhi bolo, cricket teaches us to respect and love. We just need to see these heroes do it. If they can, we can too. Just enjoy. You come here after the match, I will keep some Bhuna!”