The Human Touch
Homo sapiens are social creatures, evolutionarily speaking.
While urbanisation has created modern societies where nuclear family setups have become the norm, the trending wave hasn’t yet reached rural India. And you can see the insulation of nuclear family life thinning out as you move further away from the big cities, through the small towns, the villages, and further into small communities formed by a few families and households living at the borders of wilderness. Whether this societal fragmentation is good or bad is a different debate, and I won’t be getting into that today.
But I am here to share what I have experienced while living in close association with such communities. Many of those experiences were new to me. Some of them were surprising, even shocking, and some of them were overwhelming rides of emotion that left me teary-eyed. I am guessing you all will go through similar emotions after listening to these stories.
Urbanisation has shaped our minds and our thoughts, but can it change our hearts?
So, come on, pick up your rucksacks, join me on my journey, and take a peek into life in remote areas. Oh, but let me warn you, there won’t be any Uber cabs waiting to pick you up, no Blinkit to serve you as you “blink”, no Zomato delivery for your midnight cravings, and maybe, maybe, if you go that deep, no phone networks either for your “Netflix and chill”. Should I talk about electricity? Let’s not scare you more, haha. But don’t worry, dear, I assure you, there will be enough human connections to make up for it.
Are you still interested? Ready, set, go? JUMP!
Whoosh, thud! So, we have landed in a very remote village in Rajasthan. A village of hardly 12 households, closely spaced together, forming a tiny island in the vast Great Thar Desert. I am exhausted from the extreme heat and struck by hunger. With no restaurants, cafés, or even dhabas to be found anywhere nearby, these villages are your only refuge for the day if you need food. My driver had some distant relative living here. So, we eagerly hopped into their home, asking for something to eat.
I was greeted with broad smiles and overwhelming hospitality. They served us cool water from earthen pots. Oh, it’s pleasantly cold! I immediately felt my dehydrated, heat-struck body recharge itself. Interesting how such a simple traditional technique worked so well in such extreme heat, while my Decathlon fancy metal water bottle had failed.
Oh, we can smell the warm food in the air. Without wasting more time, we sat down on the ajrakh-woven carpet neatly spread across the floor. There are 3 plates. And we are 6 people. Who is not eating?! We soon learnt that we would have to share the plates in pairs. That’s the custom. Hmm, interesting.
Ghee-soaked besan ladoos and barfis lay across the plates. So glad to find desserts, but I waited eagerly for the actual food to arrive first. Our hosts were staring at us with confused faces, and we were equally confused. So again, we learnt that people here eat desserts first, and only then comes the main course! That’s surprising.
So I tore down a ghee-drenched roti, dipped it into the daal, grazed it over the red garlic chutney, and had hardly taken my first bite when…
“Which caste are you?”
My hands paused with the food. I was like, what?! Who in their sane mind asks that? How rude is that? I was born in a society where it is considered indecent to bring “caste” into conversation. But here I was, looking up at this woman wearing a ghagra choli, her face hidden under a ghoonghat, casually asking me with a smile about my caste.
She repeated the question. This time it was: “Rajput? Or Muslim?”
I was still equally puzzled, and I was about to tell her that I was neither, but my driver suddenly interrupted: “Rajput!”
The woman smiled and left. I looked at him with questions written all across my face.
“Ma’am, please don’t mind. People here will ask about your caste instead of your name when they first meet you. And for them, society only consists of Rajputs or Muslims. The world is binary for them. It’s a way of greeting here too, not something people consider offensive, just like how you city people ask, "What’s your name?”
So yeah, the 23-year-old me realised that while “we city people” have so many religions, ethnicities, and castes as labels, to these people here, the world is binary.
You live longer and spend more time interacting with more of these people, in more villages, far away from the desert, spread across the vast stretches of Rajasthan. You get used to many such strange questions, questions that rattle you and leave you wondering where or how to even begin explaining things. The questions and comments seem bizarre in the beginning, but gradually you realise that none of them are actually offensive, nor do they come from very complicated minds, but rather from innocent minds that simply haven’t known the world otherwise. I’ll keep those questions and stories for another time. But today, I am here to tell you how, even when you land up in a place surrounded by strangers who don’t fully understand you, and whom you don’t fully understand either, they will never let you feel unwelcome.
Initially, I thought this experience was unique to Rajasthan — its deep-rooted social structures perhaps shaped further by the desert landscape isolating these small communities from the rest of the world.
But as I travelled more, living and working in remote villages across India, from north to south and west to east, I realised that even when the food, language, and cultural traditions changed, one thing strangely remained constant among all the villages I lived in and the villagers I met. They never failed to make you feel welcomed.
These villages stood far apart in space, culture, and traditions, disconnected in almost every possible way. So what was it that joined the dots? Humanity?
I remember one day reaching a tiny chowky (forest guard’s room) deep inside the core of a tiger reserve. It was a small room perched on top of a hill, with no phone network and no electricity. Their only form of communication was through a wireless system provided to them. He lived there with his family. Dense forest surrounded the chowky, inhabited by tigers, leopards, sloth bears, and hyenas among the major threats. Standing there at two o’clock in the afternoon, I could already feel the tension in the air. How would it feel at two o’clock at night?
The family told us how a vehicle reached them only once every ten days with resources and supplies, and how they were now left with only onions and green chillies for the remaining seven days. Meanwhile, the woman roasted rotis over the coal chulha, coated them with ghee, and served us a delicious meal made from just those onions and green chillies. And they simply would not let us leave until we were stuffed. They even made us promise that if we ever came near their chowky again in the coming days, we must visit them and have another meal together.
Strangers across the country, in these rural landscapes, have never failed to overwhelm me with their hospitality. Some will offer you tea made from their own buffalo’s milk, some black tea infused with lemongrass plucked fresh from their gardens, while others will treat you to homemade chaanch (buttermilk) or nimbu paani (lemonade) mixed with pudina (mint leaves).
People often say, “Food tastes better when cooked with love.”
Maybe it is that human touch which makes these simple drinks feel far more recharging than the ORS packets we carry.
You live in a village for more than 10 days, and soon you start getting invited to weddings, ceremonies, festivals, and every celebratory occasion happening at people’s homes. And they welcome you like one of their own.
Here, we scroll through Instagram and Facebook and comment “Congratulations!!” on posts about our childhood school friends getting married.
We stay in such remote areas for a few months before returning to our headquarters or our urban homes. We get back to our families, friends, and close ones feeling like we are finally among our own again after surviving isolated and strenuous fieldwork. But the people you connected with there continue living their lives. You assume they will eventually forget you, just as you slowly begin forgetting them.
But on a random Thursday afternoon, you suddenly receive a call from a number you no longer even recognise. You pick it up thinking it might be spam, and then you hear a cheerful, bubbly voice:
“Hello Didi! How are you? When are you coming back? I am having mango chutney now!!”
And suddenly your voice breaks. You find yourself at a loss for words.
It is the 12-year-old girl who lived in the small house right next to our basecamp, who became a lively companion (sometimes annoying) throughout my stay in that village. Her mother used to make delicious mango chutney which we both loved eating together.
You make small talk and give them false hope that you will come back again someday. How do you tell a little girl the harsh truth that we may never meet each other again?
But emotions build up when you realise that you miss her too, and against all odds, you secretly wish that one day you will return again, to sit with them, chatter endlessly, and lick mango chutney off your fingers.
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