Former AIIS fellow Rashmi Sadana, has been quoted in the Washington Post in an article entitled, “New Delhi residents cheer arrival of new Metro system” by Rama Lakshmi, dated May 11, 2010. Following are the relevant passages:
“With the arrival of the Metro, many people in Delhi now say, ‘We are like other big cities of the world now. We have an advanced, super-high-tech Metro.’ It is an important marker of the direction of development of the city,” said Rashmi Sadana, a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and is writing a book on the Metro.
But the rail system is also helping people see past the traditional divisions in a country with a rigid social structure.
“It has a mix of different classes of people from different geographies like no other space in the city,” Sadana said. “People are looking beyond their communities in a new way and going to places they did not go to before. They look at the Metro map, and it has created a new way of looking and thinking about the city.”
Rashmi Sadana was an AIIS senior fellow from October 2008 to August 2009, conducting research on her project, “The Delhi Metro: An Ethnography of the ‘New’ India. Since completing her fellowship she has been a visiting faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, starting in August 2009. She taught two courses: modern Indian culture and history for second-year engineering students, and introduction to literary studies for entering humanities and social science students. She also led a research seminar for graduate students on urban field methods. She also completed a scholarly article based on her research and is working on two books. One is a monograph on the Delhi metro, and the other is an edited volume on metros and subway systems around the world in a comparative framework. The piece she wrote about her research was also just published in the AIIS newsletter DAK, issue 19.
The full Washington Post article can be found at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/10/