I am #Des, I love my existence.

Till September 2013, before I was professionally born, I only heard people talking, or watched visuals in movies (Baap ka, Bhai ka, Sabka badla lega tera… you guessed right!!) or documentaries (India…a land of snake charmers, food that enables gustatory sweating, dungs on-road blah blah…) about rural India. You know WE (not official reports but read: WE, personally) always define India by the progressive standards we’ve set for ourselves, like technological advancement, economic growth blah blah, this progress quotient is always maintained in-line with urban development, our ecosystem, at least to what WE see, hear, speak about. As far as the hinterlands, all we know is — India is a land of agriculture or for any real-life factual incidents (90% times grave & terribly annoying), or we see them in the movies, but I technically challenge this entire perception. Rural India is not just about a farmer on his farm running tractors or grazing cattle, or about people who lack social grooming and are planning to migrate to a mega-metropolitan city. There is much much much much much more to this scenario. And here, I am absolutely not a news/travel channel documentary voice over.

I believe it’s technically what ‘India’ is. It defines our roots, our culture, from channelizing our thoughts to everything we are aligned within our daily lives. Mine, yours, 99% of our ancestors lived and progressed from rural areas. It is these hinterlands, which is the epicenter of our civilization. I am not an antagonist here, trying to show mercy, seed sympathy, and prove a point, but honestly, I think, we’ve never believed in the idea of rural India, ever. The way we always trace our lives across the urban lifestyle, we have very subtly ignored them for the last X years. We know jack sh*t about them. We’ve taken very few learnings from them. We literally know ‘zero’ about what they do — daily, What they consume? How they survive? And I am absolutely not trying to make a point for a crisp marketing research presentation to any MNC. All I mean is we’ve missed (to date) the biggest treasure in this country. Yes, I do not see any circumstantial evidence of a lot of people who ‘look up to’ them, do you? Even after knowing the fact, that we’ve evolved from this very zone. The best we do is plan a week-long annual trip. (‘Gaon ja rahe hai!’)

Some facts that will support: Rural India is 1/7th of the world population, their annual spending is almost equivalent to the whole of Europe. I am talking about 1652 different languages, over 50,000 dialects, 8,000 different costumes, over 10,000 different food variations. In fact, there are 1000 odds ways in which tea is made in India. Such huge diversity, yet it remains the largest alien land to us. We don’t ignore them, it’s just that we never consider them. Yes! the urban lifestyle is what everyone loves to be in (even me), but your small bit, can change someone’s life in the hinterlands, maybe your own relatives. These people I feel are amongst the most curious souls, their eagerness to know and learn things is vicious.

Now, think about upgrading them to wherever you are, and we would never ever feel yuck talking about rural or even complaining about their increasing migration. And this absolutely doesn’t have to be you joining an NGO/Company etc. All you need to do is take a look at your own extended family (I am sure you’d have one, in your native vicinity). In fact, we as the ones who know much more and better in the world should try passing that to this civilization. Imagine, if each one of us manages to personally help our own families evolve, I don’t foresee this as a bad start or at least a realistic effort to get them to where we are! This in its real sense will be one of those sense of accomplishment and even might satisfy your inner conscience than buying a pent-house at Marine Drive. (Strictly, I feel so, you may choose to differ)…

Why am I saying all this with so much confidence? Because I lived it, for over 1000 days and I had/have/will always do my bit for them. Not judging them as victims or sharing courtesy for I live in an evolved lifestyle (the mass assumption — Urban is evolved), but to learn from them, because even they live in an equally evolved environment. Every visit would get me a new experience. It would change me, the way I behave, the way I talk, the way I perceive things. After every trip, I had something to take back from the demography I experienced. My family, my friends were the people who saw this real change in me. At times they would make fun of it, at times they were critical to me, that extra care that I was mentally disturbed. Maybe if they thought so, I was just reflecting on the way people behaved in the vicinity I had been to. So do you mean that they are mad? We’ve had innumerable arguments over this. Yes! they don’t have the technology or facilities which we do, but they have something we still don’t have and will take years for us to get a glimpse of it, forget adopting it unless we actually explore their way of living or initiate habitat cross-pollination.

Stop thinking, start existing!

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