Day 4 : Villagers, farmers battling depression and fighting their battles to have enough on their table for the next week.

He was battling depression, I could tell from the face of it. We spoke for nearly an hour and yet his eyes couldn’t meet mine. Something had happened to him. I was near Mani lake when I met this man while I sat next to his house. Some girls and middle aged women had given me directions to this lake. They had giggled when they saw me pulling my trolley. Bulls were waiting to be herded to the fields. The bullock carts rested on the ground, knowing that any moment they would be picked up and driven around. A few men were bathing a pair of oxen. They ran around in water every time the man poured some water on their back.

I was standing on the edge of the lake when an old lady and her grandkids saw me.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Towards Goa,” I said.

She must have thought that I am a crazy wanderer and thus chose not to speak further. She told me the way out of the village and left in haste.

Finding the only shed next to a house, I sat down and took some rest. Some 60 odd year old man walked past and stood next to me. We got into a conversation quickly, but his negativity was contagious.

“Nothing will change,” he kept saying. “This has happened for so long, baba. We are poor farmers, no one cares for us. No one did in the past and no one does today. When we try to say something that would benefit others, the other villagers shoo us off. Our word holds no meaning here. The politicians have become parasites. If they had it in them, they would suck out the very last drop of blood from us. We are left to die here while they live in their mansions. Our farms don’t yield crop as they used to. We cannot make enough money to pass through the month. How are we supposed to survive? India was such a bountiful country. These politicians have single-handedly destroyed everything. They talk of Shivaji because it benefits their election outcomes, but they don’t care to take his ideals. He cared for his subjects.”

I knew he was depressed. His eyes told the story quite vividly. If I was living the past version of myself, then I would have given into the negativity and accepted that nothing can change. But I am not. I like living in the present. If I have learnt something in this time, then it is this. Everything and everyone changes. As the outside world goes through transformation, so does the inner world of people. It takes only one incident to change people’s hearts forever. And it will. These politicians who have become corrupt and disconnected from the people they are supposed to serve, are also people at the end of the day. They too have the same hearts like you and me. It so happens that theirs are stiff and they need to be softened. They need to be taken to a jungle and shown their place in the world. They need to listen to the trees, to the birds. They need to be shown their inner child by swimming in the rivers. That is when they will realise their mistakes. That is when they will start seeing the people around them.

“What can one person do?” he asked me finally.

“One person can be a rebel,” I said, “If one person stays his ground and stays by his morals, even when the entire world is becoming immoral, he has done his job. You have a single flame of light in a tunnel of darkness and sometimes that one flame is enough to lighten up the entire tunnel. It paves the way for light to illuminate through. This world is constantly going from dark to light. Right from its inception. We have to choose which way we want to head. You can always start from yourself.”

He laughed hysterically, “I am in my 60’s. Even if start now, I won’t be alive to see that change. What’s the point?”

“It’s better to die now. Why even live for the rest of the years then? Even a few days are enough to make a dent on yourself. We shouldn’t expect outward change. Change once it begins within, it progresses and shows itself into the world of things and names. The choice is yours.”

I knew he had been depressed for a while, but he shared a smile for a little while when his eyes met mine. There was a little child left in him too. Just that he was left astray for many years. He needed some loving. We all do.

I moved on to the next village when an elderly lady invited me into her house. “Come I want to give you some chai and food,” she said.

I spoke with the family, who were pre-dominantly farmers. Time and again I have realised this one chain of things. The farmers in the villages were poor— that meant they didn’t have money, but it didn’t mean that they didn’t have things needed for a happy and content life. They were strong enough to work on their fields and others to cultivate yearly crops. They were skilled craftsmen. They knew how to build a house, how to make furniture. They brought clean water from miles, using natural techniques. They didn’t have much clothes but they were happy because no one had clothes, so there was no one to compete with.

Things started changing in the last 30-40 years with the introduction of an urbanised mindset. The farming practices were changed. The villagers were given hybrid seeds that gave more yield, but those seeds, which needed chemical supplements, depleted the land quality over the years. Now the land is next to useless and moreover every village has cases of sudden heartattacks, cancer and kidney failures — which was uncommon in the past. There is a direct link of these chemical induced food we are eating and the subsequent health issues. Many cases around the world tell the same story. With a lack of authority that overlooks all this— these things go unnoticed. Thus, now when someone has a heartattack, they have to be rushed to Mumbai (because the villages lack basic facilities). To pay the hefty amounts in private hospitals to keep their loved ones alive, these people end up selling their land for cheap. This is a chain that can be seen everywhere, every village tells the same story.

Now here’s the question,

Who owns the land? Who lived here? Who was native and who is an outsider? The boundaries are increasingly blurry over here, but we fight back (non-violently ofcourse) and I start with myself.

I am walking towards Alibaug today.

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