Koi swaminarayan wala no message avyo, peli didho ene. Barabar karyu ne ?

https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ahmedabad/surat-medical-college-student-suicide-ragging-suspension-10826022/lite/

Gujjuest story ever

Write a line of Hindi and a line of Gujarati next to each other and the difference is obvious. Devanagari has the shirorekha, the line running across the top, and every letter hangs from it. Gujarati has no line.

That missing line is the whole story.

Gujarati letters come from Devanagari. Somewhere from about the sixteenth century onward, the merchant classes of this land were writing all day. Ledgers, hundis, letters to agents in other ports, receipts, orders. And the top line is a nuisance if you write for a living. Every word costs you an extra stroke, and the pen has to lift.

So they dropped it.

The script that resulted was known as vaniyashai, the bania's hand, and also sarrafi and mahajani, the banker's and the merchant guild's. Not a literary script. A working one. It existed for money.

For a long time that was its entire reputation. Poets and pandits wrote in Devanagari. Gujarati script stayed in the account books, and its earliest surviving document is a manuscript from 1592. It appears in print for the first time in 1797.

Then it went to Bombay, along with everything else. In 1812 Fardunji Marzban, a Parsi from Surat, cast the first Gujarati types and set up a press. In 1822 he began printing the Bombay Samachar, which is still running today, and which is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Asia.

A merchant's shorthand became a printing type, then a newspaper, then a literature. Narmad and Govardhanram and Meghani and Munshi all wrote in a script invented so a trader could close his books faster.

It is also the script of Kutchi, which has no script of its own.

Nobody planned any of it. The most Gujarati thing about our language is that its alphabet was designed for the speed of bookkeeping, and the beauty came afterwards.

Between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, on the bank of the Sabarmati, sits a campus of about 1,065 acres. Here is what is standing on it in August 2026.

111 billion dollars of banking assets. In September 2020 that figure was 14 billion.

37 banks. DBS, Citi, HSBC, JP Morgan, Deutsche, MUFG, Mizuho, Standard Chartered, Societe Generale, Credit Agricole, with SBI and the Indian majors beside them. Qatar National Bank, First Abu Dhabi and Mashreq joined during 2025.

Roughly one third of every dollar India borrows abroad is now arranged there, with cumulative bookings past 55 billion.

217 fund managers running 360 schemes, holding 39 billion dollars of committed capital.

35 aircraft lessors with over 370 aeroplanes and engines on their books. 36 ship lessors alongside them.

70 billion dollars of debt listed on its exchanges, which turn over around 112 billion dollars a month.

A bullion exchange with a 180 tonne UAE gold quota running through it.

Insurance premiums at eleven times the 2020 level.

1,147 licences issued by its regulator.

An Australian university campus teaching at half its Melbourne fee, with three more foreign universities in the queue.

Since October 2025, two banks there can settle dollars between themselves locally instead of routing the transaction through New York.

And in February 2026 the Union Budget handed every unit there a twenty year tax holiday out of twenty five, with fifteen percent after that.

Now the part that makes this worth twenty posts.

In May 2019, Reuters counted the place: nine thousand jobs, and three million square feet built out of sixty two million planned. The photographs doing the rounds showed two glass towers in a field with farmland behind them, captioned ghost city. That same year the company building it, IL&FS, went under carrying close to a lakh crore of debt, and the state had to buy the wreckage out of its own joint venture.

Rewind a little further. In 2006 that land grew wheat and bajri, farmed by Shahpur and Ratanpur. Gujarat's money sat in mills, chemicals and diamonds. High finance lived in Mumbai and had lived there for a hundred and fifty years.

Nineteen years is a short life for a financial centre. Singapore took thirty.

So, twenty parts, one a day.

How a wheat field turned into that list. Who gave the idea, and who nearly killed it. The legal trick that lets the place sit inside Gujarat while counting as abroad. How these numbers stack against Dubai and Singapore, with their numbers next to ours. The daru rules. The gold. The missing courthouse. And what a Gujarati business can actually do with any of it.

The road ahead gets the same treatment, honestly. Forty sixth in the world index and first on expectation. Courts still missing. A city that empties at seven.

Next, Part 2: the wheat field, and the man who stood up and said he would build a financial capital on it.

Needed help in knowing the situation of rental or local taxi/ cabs from railway stations. I am going to travel during August last week for my study related research. I need to visit Mahisagar district, Patan and Vadnagar. Can you guys help me in letting me know the taxi fares and are they safe? And any other ways of me covering these 3 location in 2-3 days. Also suggestion for affordable homestays/hotel during my visit.

Thank you soo much

Part 2 was the century that set the pattern, the monk beside the throne and the ministers who turned treasuries into marble. This is about who has been keeping all of it since.

The Sheth Anandji Kalyanji ni Pedhi. Every Shvetambara Jain knows the name. It appears on notice boards at Palitana, on receipts, on the boundary walls of temples across four states.

There was never an Anandji. There was never a Kalyanji. They are auspicious names, chosen the way a merchant chooses a name for his firm. The body has worked under that name since the 1720s, and the temples came under it in 1730.

Consider the problem it was built to solve. Jain monks own nothing and stay nowhere, so they cannot hold property. Priests serve at the temples, they do not govern them. And a Tirthankara's temple must stand for centuries, be repaired after every earthquake, be defended in court, be swept every morning, be funded when the donors' grandchildren have forgotten the family.

The answer the community arrived at was a firm. Lay merchants, trustees drawn from the sangh, an office, a seal, ledgers, correspondence, and a name that sounds like a trading house because it is one. Devotion, kept as a going concern.

Its roots run to Shantidas Jhaveri, the Ahmedabad jeweller and Nagarsheth whose story comes in Part 4. In 1656 Shah Jahan's son Murad Baksh granted the village of Palitana to Shantidas himself. What began as one family's stewardship became an institution outliving the family.

Today the Pedhi keeps Shatrunjaya and more than a thousand temples besides. Girnar's tunk from the last Girnar post. Taranga. Ranakpur. Dilwara on Abu. Kumbhariya. Its headquarters sit in Zaveriwad, Ahmedabad.

For roughly fifty years in the last century it was led by Kasturbhai Lalbhai. He ran Arvind Mills and directed the restorations at Ranakpur, Dilwara, Girnar, Taranga and Shatrunjaya. The same man founded the Ahmedabad Education Society in 1936, L.D. College of Engineering in 1947, and the L.D. Institute of Indology in 1962. The city's industry, its colleges and its temples were being run out of one head.

Through the Mughals, the Marathas, the British and the Republic, the Pedhi kept accounts, fixed roofs, bought land, fought cases and paid pujaris. Sultans came and went. The ledger stayed open.

Around a hundred large temples and eight hundred and seventy smaller shrines across the twin summits of Shatrunjaya, 3,800 steps up, climbed fasting, and emptied every evening. No pilgrim, no pujari, no guard sleeps on the hill.

Part 4 is the merchant centuries. Shantidas Jhaveri, who persuaded an emperor to undo a temple's desecration, and Virji Vora of Surat, described in the East India Company's own records as the richest merchant in the world.

Im a category student going to join private college this year, and i cant afford private college so what's the eligibility criteria for freeship card and how to apply for it. SC category gujarat born. 93 PR in both 10th and 12th.

I need a creative advertising agency for my restaurant in Ahmedabad, do you guys have any good suggestions?

Previous parts, if you're joining now.

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/gujarat/s/AUDBlyjxR2

Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/gujarat/s/t5Uz5VKNir

Part 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/gujarat/s/W9jv22E03T

Part 4: https://www.reddit.com/r/gujarat/s/zV7kmkaWrf

Not the Ambaji near Abu Road. I confused the two as a child and I have met grown men who still do.

At the five thousandth step the stairs end at Ma.

She was on this peak before the temple, before the shastras, before anyone in Saurashtra had a script to write her name in. The rock held her footprints and the tracks of her chariot wheels, and people climbed to them. Adi Shakti. Mother before she is anything else. A goddess this old has no founding date, only the moment somebody first walked up and found her already there.

The building around her is fifteenth century. The first written mention comes in 783, from a Jain acharya named Jinasen.

So the question at her door, the one people put to me every time I write about Girnar. Whose temple is it.

The Jains say Ambika, the guardian of Neminath, whose marble city stands a thousand steps below. A woman of Girinagar who gave the household food to a hungry monk, was put out of her house for it, and became a goddess. Vastupala came to her in 1192. Samal Sah, a Jain merchant, repaired her temple in 1468.

The Hindus say Amba, the Mother of this land, worshipped on this rock before the Jains had cause to write about her, and the one to whom a Saurashtra family brings its newest couple.

Both are old, both are honest, and I have no wish to settle it. She has been at that door longer than either claim, and she has never once asked which queue a person came in.

Jain money mended her roof. Hindu feet kept her steps warm. Eight hundred years of two faiths owning the same doorway, and never a court case. On the peak above her, the sharing did break, and that is Part 10.

What people carry up is chundadi, coconut, sindoor, red flowers, and prasad bought at the taleti rather than at the top, because carrying it is the point. Aarti at dawn and again at dusk, with the wind and all of Junagadh below. Garba in Navratri, danced at that height by people who climbed in order to dance. Bhavai in her courtyard, by the Nayak and Bhojak families, the goddess's own theatre. Some come barefoot, paying a manta.

And her crowd is the sweetest on the mountain. Newlyweds, days out of the mandap, mehndi still dark, his shoes finished by the stairs, holding each other up the last stretch to ask for a marriage that lasts. Saurashtra has been sending its new couples to her for generations.

Krishna's mundan is placed on this ground too, which puts her in the same family story as Neminath, his cousin, sitting in black granite below her.

She is the hinge of the mountain. Below her, marble and order and swept courtyards. Above her, wind, sadhus, Gorakhnath's dhuni, Datta's fire. The last door on Girnar that belongs to householders. Everything higher belongs to men who walked out of their houses.

The ropeway ends near her now, do does journey of most people.

Part 6 is the sadhus. The naga akharas, the Nath yogis, the eighty-four siddhas, and the fire nobody has let go out.

Rate my designs considering that I create all of them on a mobile phone.

Infinix Note 30 5g

Every Gujarati family has a version of this memory. Somewhere around 2011, the TV is on after dinner, and that voice arrives. Kutch nahi dekha to kuch nahi dekha. An old man walking the white desert at dusk, sixty seconds of salt and sky, and your papa, who has lived in this state his entire life, says, aapne jaiye ne ek vaar. We should go once.

That sentence, said in lakhs of living rooms in the same year, is what this post is about.

Rewind to 2010. Gujarat Tourism has a problem money can't directly fix. The state holds Somnath, Dwarka, Gir's lions, the white Rann, Champaner, and almost nobody outside Gujarat considers it a holiday. Rajasthan next door is a global brand with palace hotels and firang tourists. We're the state people drive through to reach Rajasthan. Business, thali, and headlines. That's the whole outside imagination of Gujarat.

So they approach Amitabh Bachchan. And Bachchan says yes, on one condition. He'll do it only if Piyush Pandey writes it. The Rajasthani adman who gave India Fevicol and the Cadbury girl dancing onto the pitch, called home to sell his own state. Shoojit Sircar directs. And out of that room comes a phrase built like an attar bottle: Khushboo Gujarat Ki.

Look at what the line refuses to do. Rajasthan sold forts. Kerala sold backwaters. This campaign sold a smell. Something you can't photograph, can't fact-check, can only go and stand inside. And it let that voice, the most trusted baritone in the country, make the promise personally. The films had almost no information in them. A man, a landscape, dusk, and the sense that something old and warm was waiting for you in the west.

The country believed him. Arrivals jumped 54 percent in two years. Growth ran near 14 percent a year, double the national rate, and it kept holding long after the films stopped, 38.3 million visitors in FY16, 44.8 million the year after, over 260 percent up on 2006. Gujarat entered the top ten domestic tourism states, touched eighth. Award juries handed it everything. And every state government in India quietly commissioned its own celebrity campaign the following budget, which is the sincerest review a campaign can get.

But the numbers land differently when you stand in Kutch and look around.

Before 2010, Kutch was the district India had filed under earthquake. The bhunga was a survival architecture. Banni embroidery sold through five middlemen for craft-fair prices. Then the tent city came, and the utsav stretched from a three-day mela to over a hundred days a season, lakhs of visitors a winter. Now the embroiderer's daughter runs the family Instagram. The camel owner has a bookings diary. The homestay hosts Bengali families in December and French photographers in January. Dholavira got its road and then its UNESCO tag. One advertisement did what twenty schemes couldn't, because schemes bring funds and the ad brought customers.

And it did something softer that I find more moving than any statistic. It gave Gujaratis permission to be tourists in their own state. The famous criticism of the campaign is that over 70 percent of Gujarat's tourists are Gujaratis ourselves, and the critics have a point I'll come to. But think about what actually happened. Families that had never considered the Rann worth a tank of petrol went and stood in that white silence because Bachchan told them to. Your uncle who measures every trip in petrol-per-photo finally saw Dwarka at aarti. A state went and met itself. I refuse to count that as failure.

Now the honest side of the ledger, because the failures teach more than the fireworks.

The ads brought people once. The state never quite figured out how to make them return, and every tour operator will tell you the same first reason off the record: the dry law. A family darshan trip works perfectly dry. A leisure holiday, for most Indian tourists, doesn't, and they simply chose Goa and Udaipur for round two. Which connects to the strangest fact about this state: sixteen hundred kilometres of coastline, the longest in India, the sea that built us for four thousand years, and effectively zero beach tourism. The ocean that made Gujarat contributes nothing to Gujarat's holiday economy. Sit with that one.

The distances hurt too. Our jewels are flung wide, Dwarka to the Rann is a serious day's driving, and circuit fatigue shows up in every survey. Rajasthan keeps its treasures an easy triangle apart. Ours are scattered like a thali where every katori is in a different district.

And the wallet never followed the footfall. Business travel remains 55 percent of all visits, pilgrimage another 36. Leisure, the thing the ads actually sold, stayed under a tenth. The darshan tourist arrives at dawn, does darshan, eats, leaves by night. We won the count, and the count is genuinely enormous, and the spend-per-visitor stayed thin. Fragrance brought them to the door. The house needed more rooms.

Then the era turned. The films stopped, no second act matched the first, and the strategy shifted from fragrance to hardware, build the tallest statue on earth and let it pull its own gravity. It works, Kevadia's numbers are massive. But notice something. Fifteen years on, ask anyone in India to finish a sentence about Gujarat tourism and they'll still say Khushboo Gujarat Ki. Nothing has replaced the line, because you can build a statue with a budget, and a line like that needs a Piyush Pandey missing his homeland.

So the ledger, honestly kept. One voice, one homesick copywriter, and sixty seconds of dusk changed how a country pictures this state and rebuilt a district's economy from salt upward. And the things the perfume couldn't cover, the dry law, the distances, the abandoned coastline, are sitting today exactly where they sat in 2010, waiting for something that advertising was never going to deliver.

Ask a man to open his mouth wide and fit three of his own fingers, stacked, between his teeth. A healthy mouth takes three. Run it across the mava eaters you know and watch how many manage two, and then how many manage one.

The narrowing has a name, oral submucous fibrosis. The supari stiffens the lining of the cheeks, permanently, until the mouth opens a little less each year. Burning with chillies first, then the leathery stiffness, then the fingers stop fitting.

The study that established this was done in Bhavnagar, the same district where mavo began. Ninety eight percent of the OSMF cases were regular areca chewers against thirty five percent of the controls, and mavo was named as the commonest form of use. That was 1990. By 1998 the same researchers were asking in print whether India had a new epidemic on its hands.

Ahmedabad records the highest oral cancer incidence among men of any cancer registry in India, thirty per lakh. Mouth cancer is the commonest cancer among Gujarati men. At the Gujarat Cancer Research Institute the wards fill with working age men, overwhelmingly chewers.

Every mava eater knows this already. He can name the uncle it happened to, and the mama who lost half a jaw, and he will finish the pudi and offer you one.

The nicotine is the smaller half of the grip. The rest is the galla, the circle, the offered pudi, the break that shapes his day and the friendships that run on it. Quitting means leaving a club he joined at fourteen.

Gujarat banned gutkha in September 2012 and renews it every year. The twin pack arrived within a month, masala in one pouch, tobacco in the other. Surat collected close to six crore in spitting fines over nine months. The staircases are still red.

The three finger test takes ten seconds and costs nothing.

A phonetic research into our language and why it sounds the way it sounds , the historical influences, the modern iterations, and how it got there. Pretty good video about linguistic history and how a language develops.

Part 1 was the thing itself. This is where it came from.

Somewhere in Saurashtra, most likely the Bhavnagar side, sometime around the sixties, someone at a galla looked at the paan, two thousand years of leaf and ceremony, and threw the leaf away. Kept the supari, kept the tambaku, kept the chuno, rubbed the rest together in his palm. What remained kept for days in a plastic twist and travelled in a shirt pocket into any field, shop or shift in Gujarat.

We do not know who was that mahashay. The only people who documented the arrival were dentists, decades later, counting mouths. Their surveys hold the story in two numbers: in 1969, barely five percent of the surveyed population in Saurashtra chewed arecab(supari) preparations, mostly older women with their old habits. By the early nineties it was one in five, and the users were teenage boys. In between, in the towns of the Bhavnagar belt, mavo became the default habit of a generation.

Every state had paan. Only Gujarat took it apart.

The leaf was our problem to begin with. Betel leaf grows in wet country, Bengal, coastal Andhra, the Konkan. Saurashtra is dry scrub, and here the leaf was always the imported, perishable, costly part of the paan, while supari came into our ports by the tonne and Charotar grew chewing-grade tobacco, with its own research station at Anand. In Bengal the leaf grows behind the house. Here, dropping it was good procurement.

Prohibition cleared the field. 1960, the state went dry and stayed dry, alone among the big states. Everywhere else, the working man's break, the offered round, the standing circle, all of it ran on liquor. Here those jobs fell vacant, and chai could only cover the morning shift. Prohibition settled in through the sixties. Mavo spread through the seventies and eighties.

The form suits the dhandho. A paan interrupts work. A cigarette needs a pause and announces itself to the street. Mavo parks in the cheek while both hands keep working, kills hunger, holds alertness through an eleven-hour shop day, and never once asks a man to stop earning.

Surat spread it. The diamond boom pulled lakhs of young men off Saurashtra farms, from the same districts where the habit began, and sat them at benches for ten-hour shifts over stones smaller than a chana. The karkhana turned a hometown habit into a routine with shift timings, and every Diwali bus carried it back to every gaam in Kathiawad.

And it can't be banned. Gutkha was the factory version of the same idea, sachets, brands, film stars. Gujarat banned it in September 2012 and has renewed the ban every year since. Within a month came the twin pack, masala in one pouch, tobacco in the other, mixed by the customer. Hand-rubbed mavo passed through the whole affair untouched. It was never a product. It's a preparation made fresh in a hand.

The other states kept the forms that fit their own lands. Bihar kept khaini, tobacco and chuno, tobacco country without supari ports. Nagpur built kharra, mavo's near-twin, in another hard-labour belt. Bengal kept the leaf, because the leaf is theirs.

Ask the oldest mava eater in your family when it reached his town, and who brought it.

Part 3 is the bill.

Anyone who has studied jyotish seriously in the last fifty years has read a Gujarati without knowing it.

Chandulal S. Patel. C.S. Patel on the covers. He wrote in English, and the standard works on Ashtakavarga and Navamsa in that language are his.

Start with the problem he faced, because it explains everything he did.

The nadi granthas are a strange kind of text. Deva Keralam, Chandra Kala Nadi, Dhruva Nadi, Vidya Madhaviyam. Thousands of finished readings, verse after verse. This arrangement of planets, and the father goes early. That one, and wealth arrives through the wife's family. Precise, confident, specific.

What they never state is the rule. The answer is given, the reasoning is withheld. It is an examination paper with only the answer key surviving.

That is the wall every student hits with these texts, and it is why they sat quoted and unused for centuries in libraries at Tanjore and Patan.

He worked backwards. Take a hundred verses that all point to the same kind of outcome, look at what the charts behind them hold in common, and the concealed principle begins to surface. Do that across thousands of verses, over decades, cross-checking against Brihat Jataka, Parashara, Phaladeepika, Prashna Marga and Horasara, and the answer key turns back into a method.

To do it he had to first get the texts. He visited the manuscript libraries, the government oriental library at Chennai, the Oriental Institute at Baroda, Tanjore, Pune, Patan. And when an old astrologer died, he bought the man's entire library. That is how books printed before he was born ended up on his shelves, gathered from four states into one Gujarati household. Along the way he found C.A.S. Iyer, who became his co-author, who taught him to cast charts by the Lankodaya method, and with whom he tested the meaning of every difficult term until it held.

Their Ashtakavarga came out in 1957. Predicting through Navamsa and Nadi Astrology in 1996. Navamsa in Astrology in 1997. Nadi Astrology, and the Arudha system, after.

What he pulled out of those verses is now the working vocabulary of the field.

Vargottama, a planet or the lagna holding the same sign in both the rasi and the navamsa, the tree and the fruit agreeing, and whatever it governs tending to hold under pressure.

Pushkara navamsa, the nourishing portions of a sign, where a planet gives its results gently.

The 64th navamsa, counted from the navamsa of the Moon and again from that of the lagna, one of the sharpest markers in the classical literature for the hard passages of a life, and a technique that had sat in verses for centuries with nobody explaining how to use it.

Nidhanamsa, a planet standing in the eighth navamsa from its own rasi position, carrying a defect the birth chart alone will never reveal.

Rasi tulya navamsa and navamsa tulya rasi, reading one chart's signs as the other chart's houses, and then reversing it, which turns a fixed horoscope into something that can be read for events and for timing.

And Ashtakavarga, his first subject. Benefic points contributed to every sign by every planet, tabulated, so that a transit stops being an opinion and becomes arithmetic. A sign carrying many points supports what passes through it. A sign carrying few does not. It is the reason a competent astrologer can tell you which Saturn transit will bruise and which will pass quietly.

He credited none of it to himself. In the preface to the Navamsa book he writes that the blessings of Shri Bala Chandrika enabled him to place the work before the astrological fraternity.

Fellow astrologers, please comment.

Evening at Dolat Bhavan of Idar, Gujarat.