In a village, for the first time

I could call myself a city boy. My father being in a transferable job, I changed eight schools across as many major cities. I hadn’t visited a village in India till last summer, I must admit. School kids today don’t get to spend their summers as my parents’ generation used to. My parents tell me stories of their summers being spent pampered by grandparents with glasses of milk and fresh ripe mangoes from nearby bagichas (orchards). On the contrary, I remember my summers being spent finishing tonnes of school projects between PlayStation breaks and Pokemon episodes. I don’t have any fun Tom-Sawyer-summer-stories to bore my children with. Well, anyway they’ll be busy with their school work and I with my office work, I believe.

Last summer, while my friends were interning in one institute or the other, I decided to spend my vacation as my parents had done long ago. In a small village in Uttar Pradesh called Bharaul. Being a student of Development Economics, I felt compelled to actually experience the life I otherwise study sitting in air-conditioned classrooms.

I can’t paint a rosy picture of village life because a developmental economist sees much scope for development in such a village. But I do have some pleasant memories. The mornings there were beautiful. During a morning stroll, peacocks could be seen strutting on the fields. After the stroll, if you sit down for some tea in a rundown stall, you could overhear disgruntled men discussing Mulayam and Mayawati. On my first day there, I also met the village ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist), who had nothing but praise for the government’s health services. A team of doctors regularly came to the village she told me, with a smile on her face.

Later in the day start the power-cuts at regular intervals. My relatives there seemed accustomed to it. A surprising fact that I found out was that they are charged Rs. 180 a month for electricity regardless of how much they use. What would Ronald Coase say on that, I wondered. For economic efficiency, property rights should be better defined, the Nobel Prize-winning British economist had said.

There were two government schools in the small village, I found out. However, there was no police station or hospital. Both were available in a neighbouring village, though. But the nearest private hospital was some 10 km away. As Professor Amartya Sen would put it, the villagers face a much smaller set of “capabilities” than people like me in our Delhi experience.

Before leaving for Delhi, I had a bath next to a tube well with my cousins in a mango orchard while eating green mangoes laced with salt. These are some of the things I will never forget. I’ve forgotten my school projects and write-ups, the endless theorems and dates, but not those times I’ve spent with my cousins and friends.

Memories are what those lazy vacations at your grandma's leave you with. And that is irreplaceable. I have very few of these to cherish, and my children will probably have even fewer.

chrgydv1993@students.sau.ac.in