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 8th
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 16th century to be brought into the 21st. 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.
