Bovine Bliss - getting scrubbed down at the village pond

I asked my students once, where would you find a village? The answer was - away from the city. And then came qualifiers - mud huts, no vehicles, farms, animals etal.

Well, villages are not so far from the city. At Madh, in Mumbai, there is Erangal village - mostly inhabited by Kolis or fisher folk. Then there is Khar Danda again a fishing village. Erangal is quite close to the Madh bunglows that we use for shoot purposes. But, really speaking we don’t really consider them to be villages - probably because we see them everyday. The exist amidst high rises and bunglows, amidst traffic and vehicles. And really speaking we can’t see the farms and the farm animals that make us coo ‘village’. Nor is there the fresh air that we associate with rural bliss. Finally, the kind of dwellings that the villagers live in are written off as slums, even though the villagers in both cases were here before the rest of us. In Nalla Sopara, where we had gone to check out the Buddhist Stupa, you can still see ‘ruralness’ even though there is development all around. There are fields, and farms and ponds at which animals get washed.

40 minutes from Andheri East is a village - that fits into our perception of what rural India ought to be!

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