Day 6 : Chillin’ like a local.

I’m writing this during our last few hours here in Dugla so I’ve got my graduation goggles on (If you don’t get the reference then please watch HIMYM immediately. It’s the best series ever made.)

Ever since we came to Dugla (I’ve been told it’s not Doogla), we’ve been hearing about this river that is ‘yahi peeche’ (right here, behind). Neither Anu nor I have had to walk around outside when it’s 38 degrees celsius, too many times in our lives. So you can say that we’re horrible amateurs when it’s comes to surviving the heat. Thankfully during our last day in college before we left, some experts (Mahek, Koushik and Pandeyji — God bless the three of you) gave us a lot gyaan on what we need to do, pack, carry on-field, wear, buy etc to be able to live with reasonable ease in rural areas. I also got a list of tips which were actually instructions, from amma. So we would leave Nirmalaji’s house everyday to visit the jackfruit houses, carrying all sorts of things with us to handle the heat — wet napkins, sunscreen, extra dupatta, tulsi seeds in water bottle, an umbrella and some dry fruits (don’t ask). Even after all this, we’d be EXTREMELY exhausted in about 3 hours of going around speaking to the jackfruit people. We’ve managed to successfully cover 3 out of 4 and a half paras of Dugla before yesterday so we were going at a decent pace. So when Chachiji (Sumit/Amit/Nitisha’s choti daadi) asked us yesterday if we’d like to go to the river with her, we decided to check it out because the heat was really getting to us. How are we going to survive April and May here? God knows.

Anyway, off we went to the river with Chachiji, who by the way is one lady you absolutely must meet if you ever visit Dugla. More about Chachiji and how she has taken on patriarchy head-on, in a later blog. She took with her, all the clothes that she wanted to wash at the river, some soap for bathing and Nitisha. On our way there, we met Jaanki (this is the North Indian way to pronounce it. I’d call her Janaki but that’s not her name) who was also headed to the river for a bath. Jaanki was one of the first people we met when we came to Dugla — she also took us around and showed us some jackfruit houses in the village. I never imagined that ‘yahi peeche’ meant around 2kms of walking through the jungle. Once we reached the river, it was bliss. The ladies were bathing on one side, Nitisha was jumping around and I could feel the heat dissipating, thanks to the cool river water.

We spent about an hour and a half there and came back all content. I probably took 6824896 pictures of the river and the forest around it because it was all so beautiful. Over the next couple of days, we started hearing about other remedies that the locals apply to keep themselves cool during the hot summer. So here are some Dugla remedies to be chillin’ like a local and not fall sick, like a noob.

1. Build a kachcha house and stay indoors. The house needs to be coated with a mixture of sand, cow dung, mitthi, rice husk and water.

2. Gather some wild ber from the forest and eat them. The kids eat them without washing them first. But I wouldn’t recommend that.

3. Get some bel (wood apple), again from the forest. Scoop the flesh out, add sugar (or jaggery), mix this with water and drink up the bel sherbet.

4. Find a ‘flame of the forest’ tree and collect the flowers. Dry them out, soak them in water, wait till the water turns orange and bathe in this water.

5. Go hang out at the river as much as possible. But just today, I noticed some kind of cockroach looking insect that was swimming in the river and I could almost hear Vini screaming all the way from my house in Hyderabad. So never mind the river if you don’t fancy swimming cockroaches.

6. Stay away from tendu fruits. Throw them away, lest they tempt you.

Apart from these, there are some other rules that help, like not drinking water immediately after coming in indoors from outside. Listening to Rani (Chachiji’s daughter) list down all these remedies got me thinking about how each geography is well equipped in a way that provides solutions locally for most of the problems or issues faced by the people there. Unfortunately the patterns that we’ve followed to build and organize our urban societies, more or less disconnects us from the resources and solutions that are actually already present locally. This reminded me of the concept of ‘100 mile communities’ that the wonderful Ela Bhatt talks about, in her book ‘Anubandh’ that Suparna (our Academics Dean at ISDM) recommended to me when I was looking to understand rural livelihoods. Suparna, if you’re reading this, thank you so much for recommending this book to me. The book gives some interesting perspectives on how our communities need to be restructured to provide for basic needs like food (including water), clothing, housing, healthcare, education and banking within a 100-mile radius of everybody. Many years ago, she met some farmers in Ghana who said “The food we produce, we do not eat; and the food we eat, we do not produce.” This really stayed with her and she was left wondering about our understanding of development and how we’ve neglected the problems of food security, violence, starvation, ecological imbalance etc in the name of economic growth. She doesn’t discount the role of the market or the private sector in solving these problems, but she speaks about the mutuality that our communities are losing at a steady pace, because of our inability to see the inter-connectedness of it all — of our actions, our consumption patterns, our rural communities, our urban problems and so on. ‘Anubandh’ is truly a systems-approach book. Though the idea may right now seem too simplistic or even impractical, she urges us to start by building an active relationship with the world around us. Where does your food come from? Under what working conditions are your clothes produced? What happens to the plastic that gets generated from your single visit to the tea stall or supermarket? Where do your one-time-use straws end up? She also talks about some steps we can take to really bring this concept to life, in our everyday living. But more about that later. Here’s an interview that would give you a small glimpse of Anubandh : http://blogs.worldwatch.org/an-interview-with-ela-r-bhatt-founder-of-the-self-employed-womens-association-in-india/. Hopefully, this will raise some important and pressing questions about the way we can think about organizing ourselves and our communities in a truly sustainable and environmentally harmonious manner, if not provide answers.

Spending the last couple of hours here in Dugla talking to Nirmalaji about the local non vegetarian food options and she tells me that some people also eat squirrels here. Let’s see if I manage to continue ‘chillin like a local’ and perhaps find a squirrel somewhere nearby.