Talk with Arpita

Arpita’s talks gave me a lot of insights on how to approach people, how to talk to them, how to get the best out of theirs stories out. She discussed a lot of points with us where we might we stuck while interviewing people and alot of points about what can be discussed, on what part the research can be based on.  Here is what I got from her talks:

To talk to any person, to get to know their life stories, we need to know those people first by their actions, things about what they are comfortable about, things about what they feel bad about, things that they think is wrong in society and then slowly slowly getting to know the unrevealed layers of their lives. People will be hesitant, they will be reluctant to talk to you, you are none of their business, why will they like to talk to you and waste their time, why will they give any stranger information about themselves and such a case they will not even open up completely, you will just be answered in required words from which you can barely get to know what you exactly want. So hence it is important when you approach someone, you build a rapport with them and a relation with empathy in it by understanding them by their actions that what are the points they are comfortable with and once you get that string you can hit on it and then once they start getting more comfortable with you, you can start asking out questions about their lives to them.

In temple towns, the main task becomes understanding different layers of society and how those different layers feel about each other as well as about the town. The layers could be of many categories, social, professional, religious, political etc. You just need to figure out what kinds of layers are you looking into. A person can look into oral history of place, architecture, social bonds, how do people think about the place, how tourists affect a particular place or it’s culture, about different stakeholders and the effects on people’s lives.

Some of the people to whom a person can talk in such a place are local artisans, people who look that have lived here from a lot of time, shopkeepers and people who have seen the town go through thick and thin.

And hence inspired with this talk I walk forward shedding up my hesitation!