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He feigns ignorance about the IT boom in India. Says he does not know what BPOs are. But Pierre Cadot's face lights up when talking about Ahmedabad's centuries-old pols (group of houses with guard's quarters above them).
The French architect says he is
"surprised and sad" that young Ahmedabadis do not know where 'Tin Darwaza'
is. "I took a group of local students around the city's heritage sites,"
he says. "Can you believe it was their first visit to the Jami Masjid?"
The imposing Tin Darwaza dates
to 1458 and the Jami mosque was completed in 1424. "If you forget your
roots, you cannot look to the future," warns Cadot, in-charge of an Indo-French
effort for the conservation of the walled city of Ahmedabad. "I am not
against new urban planning. The United States was made from nothing, whereas
India has a background, historical and cultural. I am concerned about the
future of the pols." Pols are typical to Gujarat and currently there are
500 of them.
Cadot and his wife, Nicole, live with their eight-year-old son, Emmanuel, and six-year-old twin daughters, Diane and Sophie, inside a pol at Khijda Sheri in Astodia locality. After working in Madagascar, Laos and France, he arrived in India in June 2002.
It is not unusual to find the couple chatting up neighbours on the otla (porch) under the chabutara (pigeon-stalk) in Khijda Sheri. The children love playing cricket in the neighbourhood.
"It is very difficult to work here," says Cadot, "The society does not treat work as a main task whereas we are workaholics." Pierre heads a team of 15, mostly Indians except visiting French student architects and researchers. "I enjoy my work, otherwise I would not be staying here," says the man who has got hooked to bidis.
For Cadot, the destruction of the
pols (he believes they might be turned to slums in 20 years' time) would
mean the end of life's celebrations. "The weddings, the cows, the dogs,
children playing, hawkers shouting, all the life. What we are witnessing
is something really sad. But, let us not lose hope."
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