Day 9 - Konkan : A soup of diversity
Walking away from the elderly couple, while trying to keep my feet steady, I saw many native settlements on my left. At a bus stop, a few elderly men and women and some young kids were waiting for a ride. An adivasi woman— probably in her 70’s—sat behind the bench, lifeless, waiting for someone to notice her. With no one left to look after her, she found herself homeless, landless. A young man, in his 40’s, sitting next to me was drunk on deshi. I could smell him from a couple feet. Although drunk he spoke with total conscience, reminding me how he ate the red native rice which was grown all around when he was a child. In his younger days, people found work very easily in these villages. It was a fixed job. The picture has changed only in these past 10-20 years. No one died hungry, he said. People cultivated crops that were enough to feed everyone’s bellies. The Adivasi people weren’t as malnourished back then. They had the sea to catch enough fish and the forests to hunt for their livelihood.
The main thing I have witnessed so far is the lack of quality food from these villagers diets. Everyone thinks and speaks the same memories. Their memory is filled with large wooden boxes that had enough rice for everyone. People cultivated nachani, vari amongst other crops. These were nutritious and kept them working for long hours. The introduction of hybrid, chemically grown crops, have dismantled the human body. They have increased the rate of heart attacks, kidney failures, paralysis amongst other illnesses. While I walk through the villages, I witness atleast one death in each village. How are these people dying so often? What is wrong with the food we are eating?
From my personal experience, the Agricultural institute, which gives the crop for free, is giving these very hybrid seeds. They don’t care to study the benefits of native varieties of crops. The bags of lentils seeds I got in my village, were totally useless. The seeds were tiny, they had holes in them and they were bathing in a pack of chemical powder. How are these seeds going to support farmers? This is not encouraging farming, instead it is actually discouraging farming.
Konkan is a rich belt almost anything grows, but we have issues here. Maneka Gandhi speaks of not killing animals from her bungalow in the city and thus she has created a law which allows growth of a single species which disturbs the predatory chain. Monkeys are roaming wild in the villages. The forest department has planted teak and acacia trees in the so-called forest land and thus destroyed the bio-diversity of these thriving jungles. Teak and acacia is useless to the wildlife. They don’t give fruit, they are not useful for birds and nor are they helpful for the soil. The heat content in them don’t allow other trees in grow in their shadow. The wild boars are roaming freely with their predators, the village people, now watching them silently flattened their months of hard work. We lost 3/4th of our rice this year to the wild boars. These environmental crusaders should come down to the farms and try to grow these crops and work in the scorching heat to understand that the kind of ideologies they are following are not really holistic. These villagers killed the excess animals, but we can’t deny that wildlife thrived in their times. They let the jungle be. They created ‘devraai’ (sacred groves) so the wild had a place for their wild things.
Most of the villages I am walking through don’t have hospitals that meet the modern criteria. These are all real issues in Konkan. We don’t need these highways to cut down our lifestyle and culture and then bring these amenities. We can get these amenities without the introduction of these massive projects. In many cases people are selling land only in hopes to keep their loved ones alive. The hospital charges are unbearable and the only option left is to get some money by selling land.
This is the first village where I have heard that a few people committed suicide. I kept saying when I left, konkan is mother nature’s personal paradise. She gave her people everything, a wonderful land, sweet water from the streams and indestructible jungles. This was the reason why konkani people never committed suicide, but are forced to. If people die henceforth, it won’t be suicide, it will be murder by the hands of the government.
The Aagri and koli people who practice small-scale fishing are fed up. The trailers and launches that are catching fish in the midnight, have wiped the fishes near the shore. These activities are illegal, LED lights used by these launches are being run at the behest of the local leaders who gets their share of bribes. The local newspapers has a tiny headline about these activities that gets lost in the massive political ads that are paid for using public expenditure. Like I keep saying, this is a lack of conscience on the part of our politicians. We need to remind them that it is our money that you are spending and we don’t like what you are doing with it. Helicopters fly past me every few hours taking ministers back and forth through this coastline, whose properties are growing in numbers that can no longer be spoken in one breath. We had ministers like Madhu Dandavate who traveled second class. India has had Prime Ministers like Lal Bahadur Shastri, who used public transport and paid when they used anything private. How are these people not our ideals? How are these narcissistic megalomaniacs who have banners on each and every corner of the village and temple— reminding people that they are their rulers— our ideals? We are in a state of crisis.
The answer is simple, we have been divided in terms of religion, caste and creed. These leaders learnt a thing or two from the East India Company. When everything else stops working, use the age old practice of “divide and rule”, but they forget that Konkan was never divided. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, tribals, native all lived side by side here. They developed a relationship that goes beyond the confines of their religious priests and that us why Konkan is the last bastion of hope. If we come together as a people and speak our truth, we can change the tide of history. Not violently, but how we do it in Konkan— through our very konkani ideas of hospitality and non-violence.
More about the konkani cesspool of diversity in the next article. Today I am in Nandgaon, living with a family who is sharing many eye-opening thoughts on how we have lived together as konkani people. Tomorrow I walk towards Murud.
If you can help me by contributing for this walk, then please do, I could start a kickstarter or manage crowdfunding through some other website, but none of those options are available to me here in India. So, I will be dependant on your donations. You can contribute through paypal - here’s the link. I will send out a personalised postcard if the donations are above $30 and if it’s above $100 then whatever comes out of this walk - a book, a documentary or anything else - you will be the first ones to receive it.
Thanks for your continual support. I am truly grateful!