Once I had to travel to Klahanie (in Orissa)……..
I met an old man. I say old, but again it was virtually impossible to guess his age by simply looking at him. During our conversation, he recalled certain events and occasions and from that we concluded that he was about 104 years old.
I got into a lively conversation with this gentleman. I asked him, ‘Who is ruling our country?’
For him ‘country’ clearly meant Kalahandi. He looked at me and smiled at my ignorance. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said. ‘It is company sarcar that ruling our country.’ He meant of course the East India Company. The old man was not aware that India had become independent.
I showed him some Indian currency and the emblem of the Ashoka Chakra.
He was not impressed. He said, ‘This is just a piece of paper. How can you look at it and tell who is ruling us? It is goriwali rani who is ruling us.’
Nothing I said could convince him that the goriwali rani, or the ‘fair queen’ of England, no longer ruled India.
I knew that the barter system was very important to tribal people, so I asked him about that. ‘Do you know this small piece of paper can buy firewood, lots of saris, bags of salts, matchsticks, and even a piece of land?’
He looked at me sympathetically and said, 'For this paper, people fight, go away from our ancestral land, leave our forest and go to cities. Have we not led a complete life without that piece of paper? Our ancestors did. We are children of God, settled here happily without this paper. This is God’s land. Nobody owns this land. No river is created by us. No mountain is made by us. The wind does not listen to us. The rain does not ask our permission. These are gifts of God. How we can “sell” or “buy” land, I do not understand. When nothing is yours, then hoe can you make such transactions? This little paper of yours can turn our lives upside down.’
I could find no words to answer him. Until that moment, I had been convinced that I knew more than he did. We knew about currency movements, political parties, about the difference between Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. Here was a man who knew nothing of these, yet he was aware of deeper, more eternal truths. He knew that nobody owned the land, the mountain or the wind.
Who is more civilized-this wise old man in the Kalahandi forest or those of us with our fingers on the pulse of the Internet?
[It is taken from “Wise & Otherwise, A Salute to Life”, a book of Sudha Murthy, published by Penguin Books.]
Nice post.
ReplyDeleteThe old man in the forest is more civilized than me.