Nature is what wins in the end. After months of dilly-dallying, a city-bred engineer has decided to go back to nature in the complete sense. Not for him were brief weekend moments spent in nature’s lap; he wanted to relish all day long the chirping of birds, the mooing of cows and the symphony of the running stream.
Sounds incredible. But that’s what Mujtaba Hasan Askari has done.
Having quit his lucrative job at Infosys, Mr. Askari decided to devote time to Helping Hand Foundation, the NGO he founded.
Now he has moved away from the madding crowd to Murtuzaguda in Moinabad. But before that, he had to cajole and persuade his wife and children.
Conscious decision
Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another. Having adapted to rustic surroundings, Mr. Askari made a conscious decision to move away from a consumerist lifestyle to a more simple form of living.
Over the last six months, he gradually did away with all packaged and processed food items. Instead, he began growing vegetables and spices in his two-acre farm. Milk, curds, ghee and other derivatives came from his two cows, which were allowed to graze freely. The same for poultry.
The idea was to let them rummage for food, instead of being fed poultry feed that may contain drugs.
Dumps plastic
“Food items beyond our capacity to cultivate are obtained directly from farmers, particularly from the rural angadi and haat s,” says Mr. Askari. Mr. Askari has dumped plastic bins and found a natural way of storing food grains in ranjan s.
For this, he approached a potter in Kohir village in Medak to make large mud vessels to store food grains safely for a long period of time. To overcome the menace of pests, neem leaves were used as preservatives.
And what of bread, papad , jam and jelly?
Even these are made at home thanks to his wife, Afshan, who takes culinary classes for girls. Mr. Askari ensures that everyone gets enough sun exposure so that they catch up on Vitamin D. A big result of living close to nature was that none in the family required any medication during these few months. “Even my diabetes is under normal limits now,” says a relieved Askari.
There sure is pleasure in pathless woods and rapture on the lonely shore.
