Here I sit again. Perched on the edge of a plastic chair, ready for the next hot wind of destiny.

We’re in Jaipur, Rajasthan. Malavika, Denali, and myself. Surrounded by heat and moustaches and rocks and the clay-cooled buttermilk of the Indian summer.

Rajasthan is made of rocks. Hard smooth faces, their beauty as regal as their name (raja- sthan, the land of kings, i’m guessing). In such a land, hot and dry and harsh and stony, will piles of rocks (or sometimes each pile just one huge rock) for mountains, trees are a virtue. Worshipped, prized, even married at times (It’s unlucky to marry a woman for your third wife, so better to marry a tree and then the next woman you marry will be your fourth…). These trees — neem (azadirecta indica), pipal (ficus religiosa), vat (ficus bengalensis), tulsi (ocimum sanctum) — draw the shaded lines between life and death, between hot stones and burning coals below your feet.

Your feet ready for pilgrimage.

But first, a few notes from the last few days, a few images and quotes, snaps of the worlds we have been blessed to have received us in our brief journey North from Gujarat.

A.

At Shikshantar, the people’s institute for rethinking development, we read the following on the walls:

‘wherever roads are made / i lose my way
in the wide water / in the blue sky
there is no line of a track

the path is hidden / by the birds wings
by the star-fires
by the flowers of / wayfaring seasons

and i ask my heart / if its blood carries the
wisdom of the unseen way’

- tagore

*

We consider our choice of healthy and organic food as the best form of health insurance.

*

‘Working ‘within the system’ – if you beath them at their own game, you’ve lost’

- crimethinc.com

*

‘In our society, growing food ourselves has become the most readical of acts. It is truly the only effective protest, one that can — and will — overturn the corporate powers that be. By the process of working directly in harmony with nature we do the one thing most essential to change the world – we change ourselves.’

- Jules Dervaes

*

‘Love is a flame that, when it is kindled, burns everything away:
Only God remains.’
 
- Rumi

*

‘Beauty must be defined a what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy.’

- crimethinc.com, poster

*

‘What you people call your natural resource,
we consider our relatives.’

- [ankur forgets]

*

So. Shikshantar is two rooms of your house. The first is a library with mats and rugs to lie down and play concerts and eat lunch and otherwise laugh. Every book written and bound to play with and break your fragile notions of society and self sits willing on the shelf, and you may find yourself, like so many magnetic shavings, movings towards exactly what you need. The next room is the same room, and the next room, at once. It is full of musical instruments made from ‘garbage’, handlooms and spinning wheels, curtains designed from old photographs, homemade ayurvedic medicines and mosquito repellents, and pictures of smiling people. It is for the day after, when you wake up with discomfort at your ready-made clothes and read-made relationships, ready-made food and ready-made transport system, and you want to take your freedom and power back from where you left it. They have all the tools you need to see, once again, that we have all the tools you need.

B.

At MKSS (the workers and farmers empowerment organization, perhaps translated) I saw a type of town meeting I’d never seen before. I’ve been to plenty of Gandhian rallys, political rallys, educational camps, medical camps, etc. They all involve well-dressed well-intentioned well-educated people going to the villages to give, to teach, to offer,  to ask, and to tell.

But this was different. The MKSS has been working for years and a rural right-to-employment program, that is now nationwide and offers anyone in India the chance to work 100 days a year at 100 rs a today, for a total of 10,000 rs. Don’t worry about the conversation just yet: It’s a lot of money. What has happened in the past, due to bureaucracy and corruption, is that certain people would work and not get the money, certain would not work and get the money, others would have never heard of the program, and others would stick their finger in the cream.

So the MKSS goes to this village not to ask the villagers for anything or tell them to live in a different way, but rather to share the work they have already accomplished and see if they want to get involved. And the way they do this, the way they break through a cultural and power barrier that at times seems (literally) worlds apart (there are many worlds in these worlds, here), is through PUPPETS.

One gentleman gives the speech in the hot sun under the shade of the neem tree to the few hundred villagers (and our threesome band of trippers), giving the details of the employment program and how to get involvement. Another sits off to the side, at the milk shop, with his hand up the kurta of a beautifully hand-crafted puppet (glove-style), interrupting the speechgiver at will and fancy, asking as the questions he knows, from 20 years of experience, people could be thinking and not asking. He asks them through a puppet dressed like a villager, with an outrageous village accents, such that everybody is laughing and greatful and gets all the information spelled out in exactly the way they’re accustomed to learning. It’s a genius technique.

Later that day we go to the MKSS headquarters — two beautifully restored earthern goat sheds run off of solar power in the middle of nowhere — eat dinner, and hear local folk musicians. Everyone in the NGO has been working there for 20 years it seems, and everyone of the employees — those who need it and those who don’t — draw an equal salary equivalent to the government minimum wage: 100 rupees per day.

And that my friends is enough to make me cry in hope, for the day when all government and social-service organizations, and all of us who claim to work for justice and equality, take the minimum wage and live with it, to get a sense of what’s really going on.

Or, as Denali blesses our food “Let he who hungers have bread, and let he who has bread have the hunger for justice”

C.

The Tilonia Barefoot College.

I humbly request everyone who’se made it this far without fever, through scorching paragraphs of 120 degree heat and no neem leaves in site to ward off those swirling desert angels, to go to your favorite video tube site and look up “barefoot college”.

There is a woman named Bata Bhurji, whom we met, who has made dozens of incredible films about this little college in Rajasthan, ignorant of degrees and certification, training women from villages all over the world to install and repair solar energy equipment in their hometowns in Mali, Sierra Leone, Bolivia, Bhutan, etc. The movies we saw were the most incredible examples ever of local people organizing themselves with appropriate assistence from foreign organizations, learning from each other in a spirit of openess and fearlessness.

When we gave our concert at Tilonia, there were dozens of women from 7 different countries in Africa, singing and clapping along. They will be in Rajasthan for six months, learning solar engineering through SIGN LANGUAGE, and will go home and electrify their villages.

I’m leaving aside the issues of electric light in extending the working day and other responsibilities to focus on how Gorgeous and strong these women are, who had never left their village and are now in the middle of India (!), learning solar engineering when most of them are illiterate and have never been encouraged to learn anything outside of their homes (and possibly fields).

Not to mention the inventor in his early 20s who ran a community radio station at the college, building multi-thousand dollar radio transmission equivalent for pocket change, and making it available to all the students who came through. He told us he could barely write his name, but he could fix any electronic gadget he had never seen, and wasn’t even sure how.

D.
There’s been a lot of inspiration and I’m too blown away by the hot winds and good work that I have little in me to wax poetic or reflective about it. But seeing all this definitely makes me question the idea that I could even answer the question “And what work do you do” honestly — it is very clear me that, no, I don’t do any work at all, but, if it be the will of the prophets and space shuttles, I sure would like to soon.

With that, we undertake pilgrimage to the source of the Ganges, in honor of all water on earth, carrying with us the hundreds of people who have looked deeply into my eyes and asked me to take ‘darshan’ of the holy river for them. I have no expectations of that river or those mountains, and hope they feel the same of me.

Either way, we train tonight and begin walking tomorrow, from Haridwar onwards. The route is as always unsure, and the destination bathed in mystery and fog. But we’re all very excited about walking slowly, playing with the children, daily practices of music and meditation, and of course, sleep.

Blessings to all of you. And I’ll be back online in a month,
Enshallah.

- ankurbhai