The Un-Virgin Forests of Bastar:

Wooden totem in a village in Bastar - where religion is creeping into their traditional Animism form of worship

We were sipping tea at a small tea stall next to a small bus stand in one of the forest fringe villages of Bastar. A motley crowd of rather well informed and opinionated men had gathered around us. The discussion typically veered towards everybody’s favourite topic these days.

Vikas (Development).

The chitchats ranged from Obama and America, Narendra Modi and Obama, life in a metro versus life in a village etc. In between all these talks, one rotund man proclaimed. Much to my chagrin.

“Vikas ka matlab jungle nahin. Jungle hoga toh vikas kaise hoga. Mumbai bhi toh jungle kaat ke bana hain na.” (Development means no forest. If there is forest, how can development happen? Mumbai was also built by cutting down forests.)

My vexation was due to the fact that he was right in his thinking, especially about the Mumbai or the current spate of urbanization part.

And therein lay my predicament. About the last standing virgin (supposedly) forests of Bastar. These forests are home to Naxals, and not animals. One can only find a few stray deer in a largely empty forest. Empty because animals serve as food for the people living inside. Same is the case in most forest regions affected by Naxalism. The forest of Simlipal has been almost stripped bare, something my mother can’t fathom because she remembers a dense jungle of long ago. Well, considering my affection for wildlife, I should have been raving mad but I am not. Mainly because for now these lovely forests are still standing.

I am not a big fan of the romantic opinions of Arundhati Roy about Naxalism. It was perhaps ideologically apt as well as romantic when the movement had started in the 70s. Not now. Now the ideology has disintegrated into some other unknown form. What I have seen is that village communities in the affected zones are squeezed in by both the Naxals and the government resulting in terrible conditions. The Naxals do not want any sort of interaction with the outside world and hence the villages are in extremely poor conditions. On the other hand, the government looks at these villages with suspicion and round up innocent people often. A case in point is Jharkhand, where a lack of stable government has resulted in a kind of ‘free for all’ situation. Here village people complain that Naxals take money from private companies to allow them to take land from the village people. Mind you, I have not used the word ‘acquire’ since there is no such implementable legal process here. Atleast not to my knowledge.

On the other hand, all governments - past or the development-at-any-cost current one – are eyeing these forests for the minerals and the other natural resources it contains. Infact, a part of the Bastar forests has already been ear-marked for providing water to an upcoming power plant in the region. In other words, damming of yet another pristine river. As one of my ex-colleague mentioned, the region is an anthropological goldmine and it could have been applied to better the region’s prospects. Yet successive governments choose to look at destructive ways. And it’s just the presence of the Naxals that is acting as the only deterrent for the government to sell it all off.

So, between all this and vikas and a dream of a Mumbai in the (erstwhile) forests of Bastar, I have only one choice.

An empty but a still standing forest.  

Anytime.

The New Class Divide:

To be educated or not to be. Well, that will never be an existential question for anybody. It’s the question of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of education that is beginning to bother me. I am slowly being forced to believe that the current education system, its curriculum and methods of teaching need a massive re-haul. Because now apart from all the discriminations that we have in our society, the new class-divide taking place is between those who are supposedly ‘educated’ and those who are not.

Let me explain.

One elderly farmer I met in Chamoli in Uttarakhand commented that there are no ‘jobs’ for the ‘educated’ youth, so everybody migrates to the cities. He also said that the younger generation who have completed their education did not want to work or stay in villages, as its below their dignity to study and be a farmer. A young enterprising chap I was talking to in another village in Tehri, refused to speak to me in Hindi. Working for a shipping company, he has travelled to most countries in the Gulf region and hence wanted to impress me with his English. He was noncommittal about his feelings for the mountains. Similarly, in Ganjam, Odisha, the son of one of the self proclaimed last generation of fishermen declared with a quiet pride that those who are educated will not do fishing as it’s a profession only for the uneducated.      

source: http://csmefgi.blogspot.in/

There is nothing wrong in aspiring and wanting a different life. But there is a serious problem if it disconnects you from your roots and even makes you despise them. There is a problem if education means that there is dignity in only a few professions. Being ‘english educated’ and getting a ‘job’ has suddenly become the big aspiration. In Bastar, a group of women looked at my friend and me almost in awe and asked: do you speak in English? Once even I, being ‘English-medium convent’ educated, used to consider Hindi or state board pass-outs inferior than me.

So I cringe when I hear children from tribal regions greet us with ‘good mornings’ and then narrate a nursery rhyme (government schools); or when I hear of children in remote regions of Ladakh being inundated with library books, games or computer aided learning all in English (NGO run by ex-corporate people). As Snow Leopard Conservancy (an NGO in Ladakh) found out, most children studying in schools could identify deer and peacocks from their books but did not know about Ibex or snowcocks in their own backyard.           

source: http://aakashpydi.com/

The inescapable reality is that the current ‘westernised’ form of education is already deeply entrenched and changing it would be a herculean task. On the other, a large number of children are illiterate even now, so a huge problem exists of getting them into this fold of education. But somewhere in between, we all (NGOs, CSRs and Governments) can still create a balance by giving them a little bit of both the worlds. Global with the local. Penguins with Lammergeiers. Science with traditional knowledge and practices. Two examples stand out for me in this form of education. Deep in the forest of Bastar, a retired CA from Pune opened a school called the Imlee Mahuaa School for tribal children when he realized that the Ghotul system of life-skills education amongst them was fast eroding. In this school, even though children have to sit for exams every year, they do not follow a strict curriculum. Here the children dictate what they want to learn, when to learn and for how long. Similarly in Ladakh, SECMOL was started by a group of Ladakhis when they realized that the current system of education is completely alien to Ladakh’s culture, language, topography etc. In this school, the curriculum is different from what’s prescribed elsewhere with a focus on the requirements of Ladakh.

Even in a poor country like Vietnam who got independence much later than us, there is basic dignity of labour. I would like to believe that it’s the reason why they are progressing faster and better than us. While we as a society continue to create more and more divisions and indignities in life.