The Fishermen
Kerning Cultures
Kerning Cultures Network
4.9 • 529 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ramchandra Tendel arrived to Abu Dhabi from India in 1989, when he was 20. Since, he's been captain of a fishing boat. Last May, the nets he uses to fish were banned in the UAE; they were causing too much harm to fish stocks. But the ban also means Ramchandra and his crew can't fish anymore. This week on Kerning Cultures, Ramchandra and his crew's last week in the UAE.
Special thanks to Vipruta Vagadiya, Ramchandra Tendel and his crew, and Fatma Al Sayegh.
This episode was produced by Noon Salih, with editorial support from Alex Atack, Dana Ballout, and Hebah Fisher. Sound design by Mohamed Khreizat. Fact checking by Zeina Dowidar. Kerning Cultures is a Kerning Cultures Network production.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Are you recording? |
| 0:01.0 | I am recording now, yes. |
| 0:03.0 | All right. |
| 0:04.0 | Our story today is from a new producer with us, Noon Sala. |
| 0:10.0 | Who, by the way, she and I were classmates together in middle school. |
| 0:15.0 | But a couple of months ago, Noon came to us with this idea. |
| 0:19.0 | So I'm still, you know, fairly new to the city, to Abu Dhabi. |
| 0:22.8 | Noon recently moved from Los Angeles to Abu Dhabi. |
| 0:25.6 | So I live right across the Corniche, which is this long stretch of beach that lines the city. |
| 0:31.4 | And every once in a while I see from my window these beautiful big boats or dows sailing by. And some carry tourists, some are empty. It's such a |
| 0:41.3 | beautiful sight watching them float along the banks of this very new modern city. They almost |
| 0:46.2 | look like they belong in another time. So I thought to myself, I was like, you know, what is their |
| 0:51.1 | story? Which, as you can all guess, is the kind of question we love at Kearning cultures. |
| 0:57.6 | So naturally, we got excited and asked Noon to look more into it. |
| 1:02.0 | And so I do a little bit of digging, and I found that there's much more than these historic vessels. |
| 1:07.3 | That at the harbor where they're docked, there's a whole community of men who for the past two, |
| 1:13.1 | three, four decades have lived and worked on these dows with very little interaction with the city around them, |
| 1:20.3 | sailors from Gujarat in India. |
| 1:22.2 | Gujarat, by the way, is one of India's biggest coastal states. |
| 1:25.9 | It's in the west of India, and while most Gujaratis are vegetarian, they have one of the |
| 1:30.7 | highest producing fishing industries in all of India. |
| 1:34.1 | It was like a whole subculture existed, a fisherman who ate, slept, prayed, worked together |
... |
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