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 Independent Documentary Filmmaker. After a 26-year-career as a television newscast producer and broadcast journalism professor, Somani moved to LA and enrolled in the MFA in Directing/Production, Documentary film program at UCLA. Currently in production is a personal documentary about her role as a caregiver for her Mom who battles depression. The film reveals how much Somani and her mother rely on each other for emotional support. Other films Somani has directed and produced include Life on the Ganges (2017), a 10- minute documentary directed, produced and filmed in Varanasi, India, during Dev Diwali, when people from all over India travel there to bathe in the Ganges River. The film screened in film festivals in the U.S., India and Europe and won Best Short Documentary at the Berlin Independent Film Festival, and the Cannes Short Film Festival. Another film Somani directed, produced and wrote was, Crossing Lines (2007), a 30-minute personal essay documentary about her struggle to stay connected to India after the loss of her father and to maintain and preserve her Indian cultural identity. The film won numerous awards, screened in film festivals nationally and internationally, aired on PBS affiliates through NETA from 2008-2011, and has been used by more than 100 universities as a tool to teach intercultural communication in the classroom. Both films are in distribution through New Day films.
Somani’s doctoral research studied the media habits and effects of satellite television on the Indian diaspora, specifically the generation of the Asian Indians in the Washington, DC metro area, who migrated to the U.S. between 1960 and 1972. She expanded her research to study the media habits, acculturation, and social identity of the same generation in the New York-New Jersey area, San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. For the fall of 2011, Somani was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship to study the Western influence of Indian programming in India.
While teaching at Howard University’s School of Communications from 2012-2021, Somani’s research shifted to study Black Broadcast Journalists and how race had an impact on their success in the newsroom. She has been published in several academic journals and has also co-authored two book chapters.
Somani’s academic career was preceded by 10 years as a television news producer, most notably with CNBC and WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C. Somani has also been a leader of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), where she has also won several “Outstanding” awards for her coverage of South Asians in North America. Prior to teaching at Howard, Somani taught 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 Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park in 2008. Somani is expected to earn her MFA in Directing/Production from UCLA by Dec. of 2022.