A Confession !

About two or three days ago, I had made an entry about ‘Baltimore’! Here is a confession – there is no Vikram Trivedi from Roorkee that I know of, nor was there a conversation in Koshy’s Restaurant of Bangalore and there was no practical prank. All that had happened was that my sister just happened to mention the name Baltimore as we were heading back home from the Bazaar, and I told her about how the word ‘Baltimore’ came into existence and she knew immediately that the thing was just a prank and we all had a good laugh.

Now let us come to the more serious stuff. Most people of our generation would have loved the Hindi film Padosan. While I thoroughly enjoyed the banter, I was rather surprised at the real and present dislike that I had to face sometimes in Delhi and in rural Uttar Pradesh as I was from south of the Vindhyans. There were a few observations that I made though. Whenever the group consisted of the hail-fellow-well-met sort of guys, there seemed to be much less prejudice. The sporting lot, though they paid lip service to the general idea of a comic South Indian seemed to take each man as he came. These fellows were generally the liberal lot, and their politics too was of the liberal type. In all aspects of their thinking – social, religious, scientific etc. they were generally broadminded. The danger was with people who had rigid ideas, and it is surprising to see the tenacity with which they held on to their ideas with a total unwillingness to keep open various possibilities.

In the south too we are guilty of this travesty. We seem to label people of certain parts of India as belonging to the ‘cow belt’ with rather backward ideas; people of other parts as ruthless money lenders and shopkeepers; yet others as having loose morals. And in doing so, we may turn out to be guilty of doing a unjust action as this Block Development Officer (BDO) did which I give hereunder.

In the year 1976, I was working for a Ph.D in geology in the vicinity of a small village called Okhalkhanda in Kumaon Himalayas, about 60 km east of Nainital. Those days there was no electricity in the vicinity of those villages. I was twenty-four years old, and being from the plains, I used to find the ascending and descending of the hill-slopes quite strenuous. I had found the village folk to be very friendly and would spend evening hours just chatting with all of them in the only tea-shop that was there in the villageof Okhalkhanda where I had camped. I liked the villagers and could make out that the villagers grew fond of various anecdotes that I related to them of other parts of India that were totally out of their experience those days.

After a few days, I had to shift camp to a place called Babiyar which was about 12 km to the west. The distance in a plain terrain may not be too much to trek, but in a hilly terrain, it can be quite strenuous, especially for a man from the plains. Further, I had some heavy luggage that I had to transport over to Babiyar. When I put the matter across to the villagers, they suggested that I meet the BDO and place a request for mules that he had under his custody to facilitate the camp shift.

Later, when I went to meet the BDO along with a few villagers, as we sat around the table and discussed the matter, he told the villagers of how when he had been deputed to Germany for some study on agricultural aspects, he found Pakistanis to be more friendly than South Indians. He went on like this for quite some time, and in the end he declined any help whatsoever in the matter. I found it extremely tiring and strenuous to shift all my belongings to Babiyar from Okhalkhanda alone.

I write this to remind ourselves of how we should be alert in dusting and scrubbing our mind of the cobwebs of preconceived notions about men, or even of various events, and in making this suggestion, I thank an anonymous person who has advised me very rightly – to keep this Blog clean!