After preparing for a couple days before all the students arrived, the South Asian students presented on their cultures for the international students. You can read more here, and see a few student interviews here, beginning with Olga!
Monica
Mohammad
Rohini
Kultwisiso
Shilpi
Today was a brilliant day because we visited so many places like Swami Narayan temple. In my community girls are not allowed to enter but in this Narayan temple in girls are allowed to enter and pray.
Next we met the statue of a writer Dalpat Rai. His father was writing books and by watching his father himself he learned how to write. At first he was writing Sanskrit books but when the British came in India, the British were saying him that write the Gujarati book so that people understand and the language gets popular.
We also show many houses in old city. In there, houses are different from new city because old cities houses are made of brick,cement and wood so that it will strong. In the Chabutra people are coming to spend time together and helping each other.
We also visited Jama Masjid, Here 30 to 40 thousands people can pray at a time.
Also we want to Sabarmati ashram. It is also called Gandhi’s house. We leaned about Gandhi- what he did, where he study, .How many he helped to get independent and how he lived. Also we learned how to make thread from cotton the same way as Gandhi has done by himself.I really enjoyed going to Jama Masjid. Jama Masjid because it is my first time to enter a mosque because in my community girls are not allowed to enter,but here I finally entered and sow the mosques.
Today was a great day for me because I learned so many things about assignment and it’s building. I am thankful to 360Plus because of them I visited so many places and learned more of the history of India.
Went for site seeing today, to be more specific went for a heritage walk today! It was fun today, really enjoyed going to different places and obviously it becomes more fun when a diverse group of people experiences the diversity of a place.
The first thing we visited was the Swaminarayan temple. The hand carved walls of the temple and of course the people in and around the temple said a lot about the culture of the place. We later went to the pols of Ahmedabad. The pols said a lot about the creative thinking of the people of the old city of Ahmedabad. Narrow lanes, courtyards, houses inspired by Persian, Islamic, Hindu, Maratha and all different kinds of architecture, beautiful tall poles for birds to eat, each and every thing just reminded us of how beautiful and diverse the place was. Looking at the place and feeling the beauty of it was itself an amazing feeling .
We then went to 2 different mosques. Being from Bombay visiting the mosque was not new for me but I saw the rituals of the mosque for the first time. It felt happy being there, it felt happy experiencing the rituals of a different religion and a different culture. Though the religions and cultures are different something that still binds us together is the architecture and from a deeper aspect our behavior too binds us together. The architecture of the places was very similar and of course the people were not resistant …instead they were welcoming. And also while going back the busy streets of Ahmedabad which remind me of Bombay.
Talking about the later parts of the day we had a lady who left us with lots of knowledge about Mahatama Gandhi at the end of her presentation. She left us with a different view and with some different and deeper aspects in which we could see life. Later on we visited the Gandhi Ashram, again an amazing experience with some tonnes of great knowledge.
The day was amazing, all in all we made loads of memories and gained some really good amount of knowledge.
Today was a wonderful day and I learnt lots of things about Ahmedabad.
Morning by 8:00am, we started to the step of our heritage walk. I found Ahmedabad basically a historical city with many architectures. We started our walk from a temple and ended up visiting the mosque.
It was inspiring to me of the way that they built the tree kind of thing just to feed the birds. They also take care of the dogs over there and also the way they live together because the houses constructed are close to each other. In a city, each pol (community) has a well, temple and all religions live together like a family. The temples were beautifully carved and they are painted with natural colours that is taken from the vegetables. We also visited the mosque usually girls are not allowed to the mosque but in this mosque girls were allowed as it have story behind ( the king who lived there wanted his wife’s to worship god and he built a mosque in such a way were girls also can visit).
Today in the evening we also visited Gandhi ashram, we saw the place where he lived and also his room where he used to have meetings. There was an exhibition in which all the whole life style of Gandhiji was exhibited in pictures and writings which is really a good one. We also visited the book store. Sridar gifted us a book of Gandhiji’s autobiography.
I learned many things today more than I expected.
