In Dettol We Trust

You know the old nature v/s nurture debate? I always thought the nature is what you are born with and nurture builds over it. Like the fact that I have always had my dad’s nose and his toes. Or like the fact that my handwriting has been like my mother’s forever. But what I didn't know is that genes can set in late as well. They are funny that way.

So never mind that I never thought of myself as a germ-a-phobe. And yes I did find it weird that my father imposed a mandatory two minute hand wash on us for all purposes (All Sabuns are slow. Lifebuoy is lying). It didn't matter. Because a year back, my genes attacked and I ended up with a hopeless case of germ-o-phobia. Six months back, my germ-o-phobia was only second to Mr Adrian Monk. It was like being at war. All the time. Do you even know the number of surfaces you touch that have already been touched by millions before you? Like the knob to pull down a window in your taxi cab. Or the arm of a seat in a theatre. Or the keys atop an ATM machine. It’s enough to drive a woman mad.

And then there is stuff in the air. And the water. And the food.

And my only savior in this world of pain was Dettol. Dettol was my shining beacon of liquid light that could swat every nit-picking disgusting piece of vermin stuck to near about everything. I looked up to Dettol like that squirrel in Ice age 1-4 looks at that nut. And Dettol isn't  just an antiseptic. It is so much more. Do you know you can use it for dandruff? Or for gargles? Absolutely amazing! And you can dunk an amazing variety of stuff in it. Toothbrushes, clothes, mugs, buckets, straws, pencils, etc. etc. etc. You ask me a synonym for versatile and I am most likely to say Dettol (apart from aloe-vera…that’s a story for another day )

Anyway just as I was about to match Mr Adrian Monk and hole myself up in a “clean” room (the kind you find in those watch making factories), something happened. I ended up on the dusty streets of rural India.

On my very first day I gingerly entered one of two “decent” hotels/PGs available in a town which was a district headquarter but looked more like a dusty cold village with lots of auto shops. I took a deep breath in (one of the advantages of rural india, air tends to be rather clean), exhaled and set about the task of comparing one sub-optimal hotel room with the other sub-optimal hotel room. The basics couldn't be helped. There was the bed, the loo (let’s not even talk about it), the dirty jug with the “clean” water, some neelkamal chairs (seriously you can find those anywhere!) and the overall dharamshala feel.

I took another deep breath in and ran to the closest grocery shop. 

God bless you, Reckitt Benckiser for your distribution’s reach.Equipped with all my standard cleaning supplies, I finally chose a hotel with a TV in each room. And so I spent my first few days in this town in “relative” comfort. Then the actual rural visits started. This is when things started getting a bit out of hand.

Don’t get me wrong. Villages can be wonderful. Except when you are doing a project on organic manure and pesticides. You see things tend to get a bit, well, organic.

So I started with a thorough after-village-clean-up routine. And I resorted to dunking everything in Dettol. Except food which was a bummer. And slowly as I tried to clean everything up, nurture raised its ugly head. It paired up with that other trait it had planted in me – laziness and slowly set on its work to overcome my genetic predisposition to cleanliness. You know the story of that man who literally chipped off a mountain to make a tunnel? Laziness tends to work more like dynamite and this machine when it comes to chipping off my clean up routine.

Every day I learned to care a little bit less. I would want to report that this was rather tough but regrettably the word “lazy” describes me considerably more than “germ freak”. (check out the aint-no-transformer-better-than-me, Bagger 288 above for further proof).

And so here we are today. My monthly consumption of Dettol products is down by a regrettable 80%. 

Nurture 1 Nature 0

The feeling of being useless

As MBAs we often think that our skills are indispensable. Pick practically any activity conducted on planet earth and we will be sure of our abilities to improve efficiency, increase growth and in general be the greatest gift to mankind. You give us a restaurant kitchen and we think that we could make the front-of-house and back-of-house run much more efficiently than the chefs and waiters. You give us a school and we are already mapping out ways to improve attendance, school ratings and academic scores with our ppts and excels.

And perhaps we are a little right. We are of course highly intelligent and know how to structure problems impeccably (For instance: a pictorial/graphical representation of this article would take me all of 5 minutes to make. Writing this article, on the other hand, is taking its own sweet time.)As you can see we are a bit in love with ourselves. And so we assume that our skills can always make a significant difference.

Until they don’t.

So it shouldn’t surprise you that at the start of my rural stint three weeks ago, I had a grand vision of helping NGOs. Three weeks later, I have come to the painful realisation that my skill set will never achieve what these NGOs have in the backward Bundelkhand region. Perhaps I thought that I would find out a new problem or solve an old one. All that I have managed to do is gape and have my jaw drop with scintillating regularity at the gritty realities of rural india.

Three weeks back, I expected to visit villages and look at poverty. A pretty basic expectation. The urban indian isn’t insulated enough from slums and the like to have no exposure to the destitute. But what I didn’t expect to find was a whole different country. And so when last week a colleague asked me what was the strangest thing I had experienced so far, I was really hard pressed to choose one over the rest. So wide and absolute is the distance between India and Bharat that Bharat might as well be a pink fluffy unicorn.

And this unicorn lives by its own unique rules.

Rural india still observes many rules which would appear the stuff of historical cinema to us. When I was told to observe the caste based discrimination, I thought it would be particularly odd to go around asking people’s castes. But rural india made it so simple, the patels live in one part of the village, the pandits in another and the harijans in another. All you need to do is walk into a street and you know everyone’s caste. Caste forms one of the most basic and perhaps the most imposing block within the structure of an individual’s identity.

Women still practice purdah. And from that I mean absolute purdah, the kind you read about in those century old hindi stories in your 8^th standard textbook. Of the 40 odd women I have met so far, I only saw the faces of about 10 or so. That too was only made possible through a decade or more of concentrated efforts by the NGOs in this region. Being a woman is a caste of its own. A caste which bears the greatest brunt of social stigma across the board.

Women don’t leave the home. And I mean that literally. I met a woman who spent 13 years inside her in-laws house. The only time she stepped out was for some occasional fairs. Women don’t join the menfolk in wedding processions. In some villages if a woman comes alongside a baraat to the bride’s home, she is assumed to be a prostitute.

The upside is that in some villages women don’t have to buy groceries. It was heartening to find that men do all the household shopping including bangles and “lip-i-stick”. That is because no one wants a woman out of the house haggling with shopkeepers and everyone treats a woman like a 2 year old who can’t possibly be trusted with money.

There are hardly any toilets. The ones that are there are not used. It seems they are not as comfortable as the open fields. “Hum do hamare do” makes no sense in a place where  6-7  children seems to be the norm. Child marriage continues to prevail. Pregnancy before the age of 18 is acceptable.

All of the above would make one think that Bharat is too lost in the 16^th century to be brought into the 21^st. And this is where Bharat starts to surprise you.

The distance of 500 years is being made up in 10-12 years in some of these villages. NGOs working across Bundelkhand have been able to better things one village at a time. All of them are uniting the villagers to form groups and using these groups to build a new bharat. And it’s in villages like these that Bharat shines. Because despite all its evils, Bharat is the most welcoming place you will ever visit.

It’s a place where people welcome you into their homes and their hearts. It’s a place where people get offended if you don’t stay long enough for a cup of tea or for a meal. It’s a place where people will pluck fruits from their trees and crops from their fields and insist you take a kilo or two. It’s a place where the food is as fresh as it can be.

It’s a place where the smallest gesture of kindness or “apnapan” is rewarded many times over. Its a place which everyone should visit once in a while to see just how simple life can be. It’s a place which sometimes has no use for technology. And more often than not it’s a place made up of the stuff of desktop wallpapers.

 It’s a place whose people needn't migrate to the cities. Whose people can come together, form small communities and improve each other’s lives. All that is needed is a little knowledge and a little help. And when this help reaches these villages, the clock starts ticking on this slow but sure process of change.

It’s a process that is heartening to see. And it’s a process that is humbling to experience. Because my ppts and my excels will not fasten this process or make it better. But the determined volunteers who walk these dusty streets , will.