Unlearning

Picture Courtesy: Vaibhavi Garge

Air quotes naturally accompany our every utterance of the name Eengapuzha village. 24 square kilometres in area, with a mostly non agrarian populace of over 18,000 people and thus already way outside the scope of the census definition of rural, this not so quaint town was our allotted "village" for Village Field Segment of our curriculum. It stood out starkly from all the other villages we had visited as part of the PGDRM program at IRMA and not without reason. The village had wide, tarred roads, around 4200 households that mostly had multi-storeyed homes, owned at least one car, had access to specialized medical facilities including a dialysis centre, an array of commercial eateries, and even housed a mostly lively, mall.

But the most traumatized by this were my companions, two very enterprising intellectuals who had just hard earned their undergraduation degrees from TISS, after three years of serving the poorest of the poor in West and Central Indian villages, occasionally risking their lives and jumping fences to access the only toilet in the region in order to avoid open defecation.

The first two days of our stay in a mansion like accommodation on-field, only involved us trying to make sense of how we were to design a village development report given the place seemed nothing like a village. Another concern was how no picture clicked in the vicinity would convey rurality, along the lines of what we were taught in college. So, imagine how ecstatic all three of us found ourselves to be when we chanced upon a muddy inroad, with no traces of tarring intact and interspersed with as many potholes as to our heart’s content. Add to this, there were no signs of any wealthy inhabitation or economic development marring the frame. We snapped away to glory until one of us pointed out our behaviour was bizarre to say the least.

This is precisely why this photograph is important to us as a team of prospective rural managers. That when faced with something unlike our typical understanding of the concept, rather than appreciating the welcome deviation from the rule that Indian villages had to be the hubs of poverty and underdevelopment, and analysing the fundamental ways the transformation was achieved, we were in frantic search of any element, however small, how much ever an exception, that would cement our pre existing notion of how things had to be. So, as the sky darkened around us, we revelled at how the potholes in the pictures reflected the pretty dusk clouds and agreed how our sadistic selves should be acknowledging the accomplishments of underdogs more often.

Ardhra Prakash

(9th October,2019)