Malgudi Days- Time to go Rural

Malgudi Days- Time to go Rural

 

 

Mumbai. The city of dreams. The city that never sleeps. The city of bright lights.

 

When you spend more than 18 years of your life in a city like Mumbai, the definition of “your world” gets restricted to the perimeter of the bright lights. And yet, just three hours away from the city, there sits, perhaps another 18-year- old, only a few 100 kilometres away, and yet worlds apart. Her age, the same as yours, and yet her aspirations and her dreams completely different. Just three hours away from each other and you manage to see a whole different side of India; as some call it, “the Real India”. After all didn’t Mahatma Gandhi himself say “India lives in its villages”.  

 

Aaah , the glorious, and highly under rated rural life; even with its placid monotony has a certain kind of serenity that can never be achieved in urban life. Sleepy cows grazing vast expanses of land, little children playing games with stick and stones in the dust, the women of the village patiently working in the aanganwadi; a picture of beautiful bliss. Half of us in the cities don’t even know the persons staying across the hall, and yet, in a village, the door to your house is always open, for your neighbours are your friends and are truly welcomed in your home.

 

The bigger our cities get, the more compact our worlds become. We begin to filter who we want in our lives and who we don’t. We live in sky scrapers made of glass, and yet our world has never been more opaque. Our problems often become superficial, and when we don’t have any, we attempt at creating some for ourselves.

 

But don’t get me wrong; life in a village is not always refreshingly lazy. Often copious amounts of hardwork is put in for a family to barely get by. What an average urban citizen spends on their daily transport is sometimes, double of what an entire family earns per day. Running water in taps, or 24X7 electricity are distant dreams for many village homes. And with all its simplicity, there is still a kind of complexity in the social life of a village. An unfair caste system, a dismal status of women in the social hierarchy, child marriage, untouchability, exploitation  by money-lenders; issues like these continue to plague majority of rural India.

 

The helplessness a farmer feels, when yet another year in a row, the monsoons disappoint, and he

doesn’t even have enough to feed his own children. The plight of those young girls who are made to drop out of school because water is so scarce in their villages that they have to spend most part of their day going to far off sources just to procure a few litres of water.

 

Lack of adequate educational facilities, lack of infrastructure, and sometimes just a plain lack of opportunities forces countless families to migrate to cities like Mumbai in hope of a better life; and yet it is rather sordid that majority of these families end up in the overcrowded squalor of slums, leading a life even more debased than before.

 

I do not wish to preach through this article. I merely wish to remind you, that while you spend twenty minutes with the shower on full speed, surgeons in Marathawada region, in the same state of Maharasthra, don’t even have enough water supply to conduct surgical operations.

 

It's time for a change, it’s time for a revolution.

 

“You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you will join us

And the World will live as one”

 

It’s the last line of this iconic song that truly means so much to me now. More than 70% of our nation’s population lives in rural areas. For our country to remain united and strong, its people must be equal. Equality in status, equality in opportunities, and equality in lifestyle. A gargantuan rural population like ours is a repository of potential, a treasure of some sorts. To make India the next super power, we need to focus on reducing the disparity between the urban and the rural; because when our villages prosper, India as a nation will thrive.

 

 

Here's to making a change. Here's to becoming the change. Collective effort on part of the youth of  this country can truly revolutionize the way things are run. With our latest initiative Project Jalvruddhi, Enactus H.R. College hopes to become a small wave in this sea of change. It's time, you, the reader, took charge as well.

 

-Aanchal Maheshwari

(SYBMS, H.R. COLLEGE)