By Collin McClain, 06/05/2019. I am anxious, scared. In just over a month, I will be boarding a flight to India. There is much to do in the time leading up to this flight. Equipment to purchase, schedules to arrange, lodging to secure. Not to mention the crash course education I should be acquiring. Local news, politics, and social customs are all contextual information that I will need to learn the basics of; I should probably learn some basic Hindi as well.
Perhaps scared is the wrong term. This is not my first international flight to a country where I don’t know anyone, don’t speak the language, and on so many metrics am not truly prepared. I prefer the term “trepidatious,” and maybe I am also a little “overwhelmed.” There is a lot to prepare for. But what is the real metric for “prepared”? I am constantly comparing and judging myself against others. Certainly there are many who would be better prepared for the task at hand than I am. However, I also remember that I preform best under pressure. For me, having to do something is far more motivating than the mere ability to do it. Once I know I can accomplish a task, I stop putting in the same effort that I would apply if I was unsure. So while I am trepidatious, I am also excited. There are challenges ahead and I look forward to meeting
them.
But let me stop boring you with my feelings and rather tell you what it is I will do and why I am doing it. When I first heard about the ICI travel grants I recalled that the Platform Cooperativism Consortium which I work for has a partnership with an organization in India. The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is both a union and a federation of cooperatives and like other cooperatives, is run by and for the women it serves. As I am deeply invested in cooperative movements I wanted to find a way to assist SEWA with whatever skills I could.
Professor Trebor Scholz, also serving as my advisor for this short expedition, was kind enough to make an introduction to the Managing Director of the SEWA Federation, Namya Mahajan. Namya and the SEWA team have expressed interest in partnering to create several short documentary style videos that could be used as promotional material for their cooperatives; thus, as I have experience in documentary photography I am now working to transfer these skills to video in order to help produce these videos.
I would be the first to admit that there must be someone better for this job, more experienced, more knowledgeable of the local language and culture. At the same time, I remember the reasons this grant exists: to introduce and connect people, specifically scholars, between India, China, and the United States; encouraging understanding, collaboration, and joint thought production; promoting both academic and public understandings of India and China. It is in that spirit of mutualism, a cooperative tradition, that I embark on this work. I might not be the best person for the technical job at hand, but that is not the only reason I am being given the honor of conducting this project. I will be working to assist and serve the women of SEWA, at the same time as bettering myself, my own knowledge, so that in the future I am the right person for the job, so that I become a better scholar and am better positioned to be of service to others in the future.
I do not yet know what form these videos will take, what my schedule or daily routine will look like. I am not prepared for this trip, but I suppose you never really are. I will fly into Ahmedabad where SAWA is headquartered at the beginning of July. They tell me it will be damp, monsoon season, but a little rain never hurt anyone did it?