We All Live in Bubbles

Hungry cattle of Wardha waiting to be fed.

"Why are those who are feeding us dying of hunger and committing suicide?" And which role do we play in it?

In May 2013, I joined SRISTI to Wardha, a district in Maharshtra, where most of India‘s farmer suicides were and maybe are still taking place. We walked from village to village for several days because we wanted to meet the people of this region and understand their hardships and their way of living.

One life dominating aspect there is that it is a very hot region, during the day temperatures rise up to 50°C, there‘s not enough water, animals starve and people, i.e. mostly the women and girls walk many hours per day to fetch water for their day to day lives. Walking in that region, in that heat, makes you understand only slightly how difficult life can be, but it was our attempt at showing solidarity.

Another problem of this region, next to the farmer suicides, is the killing of baby girls. Girls, in India, are often seen as plight because when they grow up, they will not provide for the family but traditionally need to be married off, almost every time involving the payment of dowry, which the families cannot afford. Some women we met were involved in hard labour, such as brick making or working on construction sites.

A friend of mine, Purvi Vyas, suggested a documentary called Nero‘s Guests, which can easily be found on YouTube and which shows P Sainath‘s work on documenting, understanding and reporting the situation of rural India and farmer suicides, and I highly recommend watching it to everyone who would like to get a clearer picture of the situation of farmers, on why they are ending their lives, and on the role we, i.e. also the people in Europe, play in it. It's finally a documentary depicting some of the India I saw in those three years of living and working there but am still not able to fully put into words.

When people ask me „How was India?“ I say „Very beautiful and very ugly. It‘s complex. I‘m in love with it and I hate it. How to describe it. The longer I think about it, the more aware I become that I know too less to make any judgments. I cannot describe it, there are at least six, seven, eight different sides to everything I would like to explain. All I know is that there‘s a huge and growing disparity and all of us are living in bubbles. Maybe we need these bubbles to stay sane. Maybe they are the reason we go mad.“

See for yourself, watch this documentary, it‘s worth watching. It is a good depiction of the India and of the world I perceive, which unfortunately leaves me speechless more often than it makes me speak up.

Further Links:

Nero's Guests, documentary film by Deepa Bhatia
P Sainath on twitter
People's Archive of Rural India
Facebook page of Purvi Vyas, organic farmer located in Ahmedabad, India
SRISTI - Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions, Ahmedabad, India
A Dim Flame of Gandhian Legacy - SRISTI Shodh Yatra Report