Rural Shangri-La

Fab-India Socialists, we called them. Fancy ladies and gents in expensive designer khadi, talking about villages in India. The Great Rural.

I’d thought college would be the last I’d see them, up close. It turns out I was wrong. I see more of them all the time. Forever coming out of the woodwork.

There’s nothing inherently wrong about them. They’re good people. Mostly. Besides, it’s not a trait that consumes the entirety of their occupation. Unless they work in higher educational institutions and then the strain has the potential to take over their whole personalities. Expensive hand-woven pure cotton and silk attires, sometimes even a monochromatic pashmina draped loosely and stylishly around their necks, standing in front of people and hating capitalism. It’s a truly engaging aesthetic.

Ned Stark in The Game of Thrones famously and arrestingly said: Anything that comes after a but is bullshit. I concur.

In that vein, the issue I find with Fab-India socialists is that more often than not, they romanticize village life while never partaking of it. It is an idyllic dream they sell and market. In this little utopia, everything is rustic and golden, clean and organic, tradition and history finding their places in the modern. Perhaps manifested in a charming juxtaposition of a Macbook resting on a handwoven jute rug. Rural Elysium, indeed.

The harsh truth of the matter is that in 2024, rural life is shit. 

Life is hard in a village. There’s never enough of anything. If you’re fat, you have a paunch belly; if you’re thin, you’re scrawny and sickly. In both cases, it’s usually a result of malnutrition. And no matter if you’re thin or if you’re fat, you’re fighting diabetes and high blood pressure somehow. There’s not enough water, not enough food, not enough medicine, not enough gas and not enough electricity. The internet connection is slow and tenuous. The schools are less than exemplary. The government reach is insubstantial. The sun somehow wants to burn your skin to a crisp and dull your glow. Why doesn’t the Aizawl sun do that to you but the village sun does? What is this solar discrimination? The road is 90% bumpy, metaphorically and literally.

Rural life makes you wish for anything but.

This is not to say rural life is all strenuous. For a spell, it can be pleasant. Fishing trips and river picnics are part and parcel of village life, for one. Of course, a clumsy city girl’s idea of a river day out is hardly the same as a village belle’s day by the river. It is one thing to derive pleasure out of babbling brooks, forest sounds and bamboo canopies, but a whole other matter if you are foraging for food, either for yourself or to sell in the bigger towns.

Like I said, it is a hard life. Hard.

Which is why my brain finds it so irritating when a city folk or a big town mouse start to rhapsodize about how wonderful the village is. It is not. And no, the dream is not to freeze these villages in time warps for weekend getaways and rich people’s test drives for the newest 4x4s. Or if that is the case, let the activity raise the per capita income of the villagers. Let the village benefit. If Fab India Socialists want to engage in poverty porn for a while, or play at country cowboys, at the expense of people whose whole lives are wrapped up in this hard life, let it contribute to the monetary well-being of its residents. Otherwise, it is foul.

At the risk of contracting Umbridgitis, development for development’s sake might need to be discouraged. Sometimes there is no point in interventions in villages that only lead to maintenance of status quo and a harsher dependence on the hand that feeds villages scraps. Perhaps we need much harsher socio-economic and socio-political measures to truly bring development and progress to rural life.

For the moment, perhaps capitalism is what rural life needs. A free market and capitalistic ideals might increase production and might lessen dependence on the government which has the potential to raise greater political awareness. As Albert Einstein put it: a hungry stomach is not a good political advisor. We could have a political awakening where the Big Man does not control us with about 20,000 rupees a year. I will drink to that!

As for ecology, and environmentalism, and all that jazz, as the men in Sailam would say: It is easy to preserve nature; you just have to do nothing to it.