Town Mouse and Country Mouse – Dholka Edition

April 1, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe3 Comments

I’ve been hearing about potato chips a lot lately.

Not the packed kind. But the kind that starts with sacks of potatoes and involves peeling, slicing, drying, storing. In kilos. Plural. The first time it came up, I instinctively slotted it into a “lot of unnecessary work” category in my head. The kind of thing you do if you absolutely have to (or not even then) or maybe as a one-off, slightly ambitious weekend plan that you later regret.

Except… no one here was treating it like that. It’s not even considered as “extra.” It’s just something that needs to be done alongside everything else that also needs to be done. And no one seems particularly overwhelmed by it.

A lot of the people I work with aren’t from big metropolitan cities. They’re from towns and smaller cities, places that are not necessarily rural, not even as small as Dholka. But they are from places where certain ways of living haven’t been cut down for convenience.

Udaipur: The Trip That Planned Itself

March 27, 2026March 27, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe5 Comments

There are trips you plan for months with meticulously saved pins, bookmarked cafés, colour-coded itineraries.

And then there are trips like this one. This trip was not planned. At least not for me.

This one began as a passing conversation on a Friday morning. A bunch of colleagues were casually talking about heading to Udaipur for the weekend. For me it seemed like the kind of a plan that usually sounds exciting at 9 AM and disappears by 11.

Except this one didn’t.

Ahalya

March 9, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe6 Comments

The story of Ahalya is one of the most haunting episodes from the ancient Indian epic Ramayana. Over centuries it has been told and retold in many forms, sometimes portraying her as guilty, sometimes as innocent, and sometimes simply as a woman caught in circumstances beyond her control.

This short piece is my attempt to imagine those long centuries of silence from Ahalya’s own perspective.

Between Two Skies: A Mumbaikar in Dholka

March 5, 2026March 5, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe22 Comments

Living in Dholka is often a roller-coaster ride of emotions.

Most days, I love the quiet stillness of this town. I love living alone. There is something oddly satisfying about the independence. And yet, sometimes, it can be lonely.

The loneliness becomes most apparent when someone from Mumbai comes to visit. The moment they arrive, the house feels alive again. The two days they stay pass in a blur of laughter, long conversations, shared meals, and a familiar comfort that only people from home can bring.

But a few hours before they are meant to leave, a small pit begins to form in my stomach.

Suddenly, I feel the urge to ask them to stay a little longer. Or, more dramatically, to pack my bags and simply go back to Mumbai with them.

Faith, Folklore, and a Diverted Railway Line

February 21, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe18 Comments

In India, every nook and corner seems to hold a story. People and their lives are deeply entwined with both the physical and the metaphysical worlds around them. It is the people, their beliefs, conventions, and collective memory that make places come alive. Otherwise, it’s just a tree. Or a road. Or a railway track. It is the stories layered onto them that give them character.

Perhaps that is why I enjoy speaking to locals. They carry versions of the world that don’t exist on maps or information boards. And that makes their stories interesting.

For someone from Mumbai, where the city’s lifeline is its local trains, I was oddly excited the first time I saw a railway crossing on the way to my office from Dholka. Rail tracks, for me, are not just infrastructure they are routine.

And as it often happens here, a story sprang from that small observation.

My driver pointed toward a turning near Arnej and said, almost casually,
“Boot Bhavani ka mandir hai yahan. Railway line bhi unke chakkar mein mud gayi thi.” (There’s a temple here. The railway line bent because of it.)

The Day We Woke Up at 5 AM for Chaos

February 14, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe12 Comments

Living away from home does strange things to weekends. You either sleep through them, work through them, or suddenly decide to drive somewhere at sunrise without thinking it through.

A few days earlier, our motley group of archaeologists, architects, engineers, and project people held together by deadlines and long site days, had been having one of those casual conversations that start with banter and quietly drift into truth. Someone mentioned how isolated life out here can feel (we are in Saragwala, a small village near Dholka, Ahemdabad). We’re far from “civilisation”, and once work ends, the day ends. No spontaneous meet-ups, no late coffee runs, no city chaos to disappear into.

We laughed it off. Like always.

Then someone said, “Let’s go somewhere this weekend.”

And that’s how the “plan” to visit Nal Sarovar happened.

Except… it wasn’t really a plan.

Kindness of Strangers — The People of Dholka

February 6, 2026February 14, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe10 Comments

When I first moved to Dholka, I did not expect to be held by a town like this. And the credit goes entirely to the people around me, who slowly began to fill the unfamiliarity with warmth. My neighbours. My driver. The maids. The man who delivers the water camper. The istriwala. The hotel staff near my house. The salesperson at the local departmental store.

Now I understand, in the most practical way, what we mean when we say “Man is a social animal” and that “it takes a village.”

मैं शायर तो नहीं

January 17, 2026January 27, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe4 Comments

People who know me know that my Hindi is comical (definitely not a thing to be proud of and I’m not). While speaking I forget half of the words and for the other half I end up using Marathi substitutes. So it generally is a task for the other person to decipher what I mean to say.

But in my defence, this happens only when I’m super excited to just blurt out my story. On other rarer occasions when I have time and patience to weigh my words more carefully I come up with fairly good Hindi.

Dholka: In Records vs Reality

January 16, 2026February 14, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe4 Comments

When I first stepped into Dholka, I was terrified by it. It felt small, slow, and almost empty. I realised I could drive across the entire town in barely twenty minutes. My workplace was going to be in Saragwala, another fifty-three kilometres away from this “town,” deeper into the rural interiors. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed. Completely.

So I did the only thing that came naturally to me. I tried to understand Dholka my way.

I started to understand Dholka not in its streets, but in the pages of the Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency: Ahmedabad. The history buff in me tried to acclimatise to the town by reading its recorded past. The town described in those pages slowly made the one around me feel more familiar.

Reading it while on my first day in Dholka helped create a bridge between what was once recorded and what now exists…The gazetteer did not describe Dholka as a quiet, forgettable small town. It spoke of a place shaped by mythology, trade, politics, and survival.

From Mumbai’s Madness to Dholka’s Whisper

January 7, 2026February 14, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe11 Comments

I had never imagined leaving Mumbai. With generations of my family born and raised here, the city has always felt like my ancestral home. Mumbai is extraordinary. It is efficient, demanding, and relentless. But it expects those same things from you too!

Just a few days ago, my life was structured around clocks, train timings, meeting slots, traffic delays, and the constant mental calculation of if I leave now, I might just make it on time. Mumbai has a way of compressing time until everything feels urgent.