Guwahati

[dramatic music]

95 years on, how do people feel about being asked the caste question again? I've been catching up with a group of friends in Guwahati.

Hello, I'm Anindum Goswami from Assam, Guwahati.

Hello, I'm Konkana.

I'm working as a banker in Assam.

Hello, I'm Varsha.

I'm a research scholar and based in Guwahati.

What does caste mean in your everyday life? Do you know your caste?

I haven't been for a long time, uh, I could be wrong.

So in, uh, not everywhere, but in Guwahati, for the World Junior Championship, they gave us the player bathroom.

Yeah.

Because I, I, I mean, there, I, there's consideration there-

Yeah, that's something we ignore

... uh, usually, uh, uh, I mean, I've only gone f- uh, not gone for a lot of domestic competitions, so I wouldn't know how it is, uh, then.

But it's usually better or if not, as I said in Guwahati, they arrange for us, like the player washroom, which is obviously clean because a bunch of your, uh, players are going there.

So there is that sort of a consideration taken at international tournaments and non, like in shooting and in badminton and in tennis, they, they definitely have been.

We've barely scratched the surface.

If you think about the new frontiers that we are opening up geographically, whether it was Post Malone in Guwahati or Guns N' Roses that will play there in November, Ed Sheeran in Shillong, Def Leppard in Shillong, um, adding fragmental markets like Chennai and Hyderabad and Pune, um, you know, in addition to all of the big markets.

Uh, we are seeing tremendous interest and appetite for music all over.

When we started Lollapalooza five years ago, uh, you know, for our first festival, we may have had around 30,000 people, right? We're more than two times that now, uh, and it'll continue to grow.

Uh, in fact, we've been trying to study this for a few years now and hope to have something to share with you in the near future, right? What Coldplay, for example, did to end the bar, right? We measured this.

So we know that with two days of work there, we created 641 crores of economic impact.

What Post Malone did to Guwahati in one night-

Hmm

And you really have to keep... hear from a whole lot of different stakeholders, you have to come in with an empty mind and really understand what's there.

And I've seen, I'll let Nancy talk about it, but I've seen the same thing in Pride in the way that we had the opportunity to go into the waste picker community in Guwahati was a very similar approach.

That's great.

Nancy, coming to you, I want to pull out a couple of things.

I think one, something that's not understated and needs to be shouted out a bit is that Assam and Guwahati and Pride is a female-led co-op, Waste Collective, right? Could you give some context around what the co-op is doing, what it's creating and some key learnings for everyone to hear?

Thanks, John.

I think I'm going to pick from what you talked about earlier, right? The business case and the geopolitics of it.

He has written extensively on gender and sexuality issues.

Rituparna Padgiri teaches sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

Her research explores questions of culture, food, media, gender, and pedagogy.

Dipali Aparajita teaches in the Department of Sociology, Ranchi University.