Taking the city bus is a new experience for me. After the faculty van drops me off, I usually take an auto rickshaw home, because I’m still about two km away. But there’s another faculty member, Girish, who gets off at the same stop and goes the same direction. He usually takes the city bus, something that is quite intimidating for me as the passengers are smashed like sardines.
Last Friday Girish and I took the bus after the van dropped us off. I noticed that the women sit separately from the men. The women sit in the front-half of the bus, while the men since in the back-half. It wasn’t over-crowded in the front-half. In fact, it felt quite safe. When I got on the bus, the conductor was asking me in Kannada where my stop was, so he knew how much to charge for the bus ticket. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but then he remembered me as this is my second city bus adventure and suddenly said, “Banashankari.” I said, “yes,” because I was so excited he remembered me. My stop is really “Janta Bazaar,” but the point was that I could finally buy the bus ticket as we both knew where I was going. More women got on the bus, some women got off the bus, and those women who were sitting kept showing me the empty seats available. But with my bottled water, purse, book bag and lunch box, I didn’t want to chance getting stuck in a seat that would be difficult to exit. Slowly I became a sardine in the women’s half of the bus. Girish kept telling me that I needed to move toward the door, two stops before I got off, so I could easily get off the bus. I wasn’t sure I could do it as it would require a lot of pushing and shoving. I shared this with him and said “I’ve come to India for peace in my life.” Girish said, “Then do it peacefully.” I finally got off at my stop, it was faster and cheaper than an auto. But I’m not sure I could have done it without Girish. While I had a positive experience on the bus, I found out Monday that Girish was pick-pocketed on the bus. He said that it had never happened to him before. But he was wearing a kurta pajama pants, which had loose pockets. He didn’t even feel his wallet lifted from his pocket. In all my travels to India, I have been driven everywhere in a comfortable car, but occassionaly a relative took me with them in an “auto” for a short ride. Public transportation is something new for me in India, but clearly I need to be just as cautious as I would be in New York or DC.
Indira S. Somani, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Media, Journalism and Film at Howard University, Washington, D.C. Somani studies effects of satellite television on the Indian diaspora, specifically the generation of the Asian Indians who migrated to the U.S. between 1960 and 1972, and their media habits.
She has been published in the Howard Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication Inquiry, International Communication Research Journal, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and the Asian Journal of Communication.
For the fall of 2011, Somani was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship to study the Western influence of Indian programming in India.
Somani is also an award winning independent producer and director of documentaries. Her most recent production, Life on the Ganges (2016), is a 10- minute documentary short about the life of one boatman, who rows tourists along the Ganges River in Varanasi, India, particularly around Dev Diwali when people from all over India travel there to bathe in the Ganges to wash away their sins and purify their souls. The film has been screening in film festivals all over the U.S.
Another production, Crossing Lines (2007), is a personal essay 30-minute documentary about her struggle to stay connected to India after the loss of her father, and about how Asian Indians maintain and preserve their cultural identity. The film has won numerous awards, screened in film festivals nationally and internationally, screened on PBS affiliates, and has also been distributed to more than 100 university libraries in the U.S. through New Day films.
Somani brings 10 years of broadcast journalism experience as a television news producer to the classroom, most notably with CNBC and WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C. She has been a leader of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), where she has also won several “Outstanding” awards on her coverage of South Asians in North America.
Prior to joining Howard University, Somani was an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA) and American University’s School of Communication (Washington, DC). Somani earned her Master’s in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University in 1993, and her Ph.D. from the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park in May 2008.