Villages, Trains, Accents, and Me!

Of late I’ve been exposed to a lot of different types of people ranging from the village simpleton to the razor sharp minds from the big cities. Some of them are completely unable to communicate in English, and when faced with anything that seems to test your comprehension in “English” they are bought to their knees even though they may have understood or rather, comprehended the meaning of something better that supposed “native” English speakers such as me. The same lot are geniuses at math, leaving tortoises like me far behind. There are those who know absolutely everything that’s relevant to any given subject there are those who are disinterested and even those who are uninterested. And then there are those who do not know that Nike is a brand. God, I know that coming from a village of people who work the soil and tend animals you may have never seen high end fashion label stores like Gucci and Versace, but can you not know that Nike is a shoe brand or that TOI is India’s leading English language daily? Ok, I may be a little presumptuous with those two but how in the name of God most high, can you not have heard of at least one English language daily, the Mid Day, the Hindu, the Statesman, one of those? India Today, Outlook, something? Oh please, do you actually live under a rock in that village of yours?

I’m taking the example of one dude here and trying to generalise but when I found out that more that a few were from the villages, it really struck me how bad we really are and how fortunate I am to have lived in a city all my life, being exposed to a more modern lifestyle compared to this lot. I’m not belittling them here, they come from a completely different background with a different set of sensibilities and mannerisms, they have grown up seeing the earth and respecting it for what it’s worth, a completely different experience to my own. For someone like me, the earth is simply a giver of food in one form or another, a repository of material for buildings and furniture and a place to accept all that we’re done with and want to rid ourselves of. As for the village folk, they’d probably be better at reading the signs of decay in a tree, know how to start a fire in the wilderness, know how to use the earth for what it’s worth and they’d think twice before mistreating her.

After a civil exchange of words with a certain KC, I was reminded of what India truly is, a collection of villages, that’s where the real India is, and that India is connected to ours by the largest transporter of men and goods in the world, the behemoth called the Indian Railways. I’ve always looked at those long blue serpents billowing smoke from their fronts, as the means that connected us to “them”, the filthy, uncouth residents of some obscure village with a name that’s too difficult to pronounce. My, how I was wrong! The village folk are not dumb, without them, there’d be no rice in those ceramic jars that I have at home, and there’d be no meat on the table, no fish for the crow to steal.

I’ve lost track of what I was saying and where this post was supposed to go, so I’ll give it a rest now.

Till next time, adios!

PS – There was a debate (Face The Nation) airing live on CNN-IBN about the issue of homosexuality in religion (remember that Jobin and me can come clean now, it’s finally legal!), but alas, I moved to writing this. I tried this channel because of the obvious American connection but sadly, I was let down yet again. There’s none of the refinement that you expect from an international news channel, all you get is the typical Indian attitude of screaming to be heard and discussions with fragments of sense in each sentence but none on the whole.