For Talaja, farming near the coast below caves carved into the hill two thousand years ago.
Caves above the fields
Talaja farms onion and cotton within reach of the coast, and the hill above the town holds rock-cut Buddhist caves carved a very long time ago - a monastic community that lived here, and then did not.
Almost nobody locally thinks about them daily. They are simply there, above the fields.
Neither inland nor coastal
The town's practical difficulty is that it belongs fully to neither economy. Not far enough inland to be purely agricultural, not on the water enough to be a fishing town. It sits between, and between is a difficult place to build an identity.
Clients describe a town that feels perpetually secondary - to Bhavnagar, to Mahuva, to somewhere. That reading transfers readily onto the self.
What the work addresses
Whether "in between" is a limitation or simply a description. The caves are a useful counter-example: people chose this hill deliberately, for reasons that made sense to them, and the fact that the world moved elsewhere did not retroactively make the choice wrong.
Most of the work here is about self-assessment relative to somewhere else, and the somewhere else is doing all the damage.
Sessions
Online, in Gujarati.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this about spirituality?
- Only if you want it to be. The work is practical and fits whatever framework you hold.
