Notes

Prior to the commencement of the research, while searching for participants, I felt a deep sense of overwhelm about the large number of participants I was about to interview. I found myself troubled by what I would hear from my participants, if my questions would elicit unpleasant thoughts, feelings post interviews and whether my participants (both sets of participants) would feel like I was using them (a term that bothered me until my fieldwork began). More importantly, I was worried about bringing my biases and preconceived ideas into the study, thereby increasing the difficulty of differentiating the participants' voices and mine through the subsequent research process. I kept wondering whether my participants would mould their answers according to any stance I would appear to have taken on at the beginning of the interviews. My apprehensions and the above troubling thoughts dissipated and simultaneously heightened once the data collection started by mid-November.
I acknowledge that the field was mainly accessible to me due to my social location as a researcher- I was acquainted with my first point of contact, Dr KL, as a batchmate from my mother's medical college days. I believe that my caste/class location and caste network as a savarna researcher from a reputed university played a role in making the largely inaccessible field of bariatric surgeons and participants open and accessible to me. The relationship with Dr KL helped establish a rapport with her (I remember calling her aunty since the very beginning), which proved beneficial when establishing contacts with the other four bariatric surgeons. Throughout the recruitment of participants, I wondered if the sixteen people I spoke to found a sense of familiarity with me since they were asked to speak to me through their bariatric surgeons (and many participants explicitly mentioned they would have never turned down their doctor's request since they deeply revered their doctors). Further, my knowledge of English, Hindi and a little bit of Telugu aided in gaining the participants' trust, who also seemed fascinated by the research content, especially the exploration into the participants' journey with the surgery.
As the research began in mid-November and I was collecting participant information and familiarizing myself with the field, I realized how dynamic and ever-evolving the research process is. I began to adapt the interview questions, engaging with participants, the duration to suit each interview. I also regretted being unable to physically meet my research participants as telephonic interviews could not capture the non-verbal cues during the study, though, through Zoom interviews, I was able to gauge my participants' reactions and non-verbal gestures better. The candidness with which participants detailed parts of their struggle before the surgery, ranging from the humiliation and denigration of being in a visibly fat body to the multiple ways their lives changed after the surgery (as we shall see in the findings chapter), brought a multitude of emotions within me. I felt angered and frustrated, sometimes terribly helpless hearing some of the life stories of my participants - stories of self-harm, suicidal ideation, extended bouts of depression due to the constant fat shaming before the surgery left me with a heavy feeling in my gut. Some interviews left me relieved that I remained hidden behind a telephonic interview and escaped judgement on my fatness (especially after one of the doctors enquired if I was myself an obese researcher and remarked that I would be doing injustice to the study had I been obese myself). Other days, I distinctly remember ending the meeting with a definite contradiction to my pre-existing ideas about the nature of bariatric surgery, feeling a sense of wonder at the multiplicity and heterogeneity of experiences. Even as I write this, I hear the giddy laughter of the participant who said she received marriage proposals after losing several kilos of weight or witness the acknowledging smiles and nods of participants who shared their experiences of being fat-shamed with me.