Week 29 – Research In Biaora, MP
Testing in Biaora, kids and their lives in the village, the worry of their parents and pushing respondents into a reflective zone as a researcher.
This past week, I was in Biaora, a small village in Madhya Pradesh, conducting user tests for a product that we’re working on at TinkerLabs.
While I’m not at liberty to discuss the surprising testing findings, I thought of taking this opportunity to discuss my observations in the village and some conversations that I had which were unrelated to the task at hand.
Kids and their lives in the village
I only wish the environment was such that I could have recorded this moment. But here’s a feeble attempt at describing what I saw:
An old man was playing with a 5-6-year-old on the road. The man was definitely not the father but they were having a jolly good time together. The man would lift the kid as the kid would struggle to break free and both of them would laugh together.
The more I looked around, the more I could see how interconnected all of their lives were. Each kid had people looking out for them and familiar glances were exchanged as these kids walked around the neighbourhood. The recruiters could ask anyone about the whereabouts of a person and they would know exactly where to send you. They were masters of their area, with information about everyone and everything that was in it.
In contrast, I think about the lives of children in a more urban setting. Lives spent in apartment complexes, isolated societies and nuclear families. Very few people know who you are and even fewer care about what you’re doing.
I wonder what would happen to the children of Biaora if they were uprooted and sent to live like the other side of Indian society. I presume that it would feel so out of place for them: no familiar faces, no safe spaces and a new fear of saying hello to strangers.
Ease in wayfinding because of the lack of uniformity
While navigating through the village, we never once had to use Google Maps. This is funny because the three of us are pretty terrible at remembering ways but I did not have the slightest problem back in Biaora, even if I saw a road one time.
When I think about what makes wayfinding easy in villages, I can vividly remember each turn being starkly different from the other. Everything about it: the road quality, the colour of the buildings, the way the turn is made … everything differed. Every single difference was a new affordance for me to distinguish one turn from the other.
If you compare this to something like Mumbai: the roads are the same, the buildings look familiar and one has to really try & identify something to differentiate one point from the other. Somehow in the mad race for uniformity, we’ve converted our entire environment into a concrete jungle; depriving it of the flavour that it could have possessed if individuality had been given enough importance during the planning process.
The worry of parents
A lot of the time, for my tests, I was speaking to school / college-going boys. Right after I would come out, I would be met with some pretty anxious parents. They would ask me questions like “is there anything wrong with my son” or they would ask me if the boy had any “buddhi” (brain) and if they could do something with their lives.
Some of the boys that I talked to were incredibly sharp, albeit not exposed to the same opportunities and knowledge that someone more privileged has access to. When the parents of these boys asked me questions like the ones discussed above, I was almost touched by their worry about the kid.
For example, a boy that I interviewed obtained 86% in his final high school examination. 86. That’s more than some of my own friends! If a boy is faring just as well as someone in the city on the exact same test, but the general perception is that city kids are smarter, it just goes to show how we’ve equated intelligence with the number of opportunities that a person has access to.
This boy will now always have a hard time growing up in the world because of his limited access to opportunities. A boy in the city who scored 86% will go on to a college, be exposed to incredible mentors, find the opportunities to make a name for himself while this boy in the village (who scored the exact same 86%) is enrolled in a government college where the professors don’t even come to teach. This person will have a starkly different life from this point onwards.
This is something that we had discussed in the Xperimenters programme at Science Gallery Bengaluru as well, wherein Jahnavi had mentioned how knowledge, skill & acumen was by and large shaped by the environment that people had access to (while discussing the larger point of why eugenics was a failure).
Pushing respondents into a state of reflection as a researcher
This is something that I realised while in a conversation with Prachi Mittal and Sakshi Jain yesterday night.
The tests that I was conducting were majorly qualitative tests, meaning that the researcher is supposed to probe and understand why something feels good or bad to the participant. Oftentimes, a participant would come back and I’d ask them how did they find the experience. They’d say good. That gives me nothing.
I would then ask them what about it felt good and they’d elaborate a little bit more. I’d then probe on why it made them feel good and they’d look at me like it was the stupidest question to ask on the planet. They’d respond with something like, “bhaiyya ab ye kya boloon mei … tha mast tha (what else do I tell you, it was good only)”. If I stuck to my question, they would then enter a thinking zone which I now realise was a reflective zone.
Sometimes I wonder if, after my tests, the participants take back something about their own selves; since all they’ve done with me is reflect on an experience & their own feelings. Do they now have a better understanding of who they are, what they like and what they dislike? Have they found a new corner of their personality?
Were they even willing to see it? Or have I forced them to see things that they don’t want to see because I desperately desire those answers that they’re not actively thinking about?
Or am I the only one aware of this and to them, it’s just another conversation that they will forget about as they walk out the door?
I wonder.
It is very peculiar yet interesting for me to find out that things one witnesses in their daily routine, thinks about frequently and appreciates its presence in their life - becomes small moments of epiphany for another person. I am particularly referring to your astonishment at how families in a semi-rural areas co-depend on neighbors and how 'visual differences of things on roads' make them differentiable, thus more remember able.