This morning I caught the train back to Delhi from Chandigarh. I spent the weekend in the village of Malikpur, which was an interesting experience. The village is about an hour out of Chandigarh, but the city limits are always stretching and it won’t be many years before the village is swallowed up and the locals have become rich from selling their land to developers, then they will all live in flats, drive cars and loose their identity. At present it is like one big family, everybody seems to know everybody and they all wander freely in and out of each others living spaces. Privacy is an alien concept to them, as is silence.
On my first evening the local priest was chanting Sikh Scriptures over the loud speaker system so al the village could hear. This went on till 11.00pm and started again at 4.00am. I was up at 5.30am and after a ‘chai’, went with my host into the fields. He told me he had been working his land all night and managed one hour of sleep, no doubt in the field, Captain Prem Singh is known in the village for not needing any sleep and working all hours possible. I asked him his age and he thought almost 60, and as there are no records of his birthday, we have to take his word for it. It is common in rural India that there are no records. Water buffalo play a major role in village life with almost every household owning two or three. Breakfast consisted of very tasty maize ‘Makki’ rotis cooked with ’saag’ (often called spinach but actually a mustard plant) and served with white buffalo butter, buffalo curd and washed down with buffalo milk, or maybe a tea or coffee made with buffalo milk and lots of sugar for good measure.
Here are a few pictures of village life.
The village potter with his favourite buffalo
Breakfast is cooked over a buffalo dung fire!
Morning prayers to a Hindu deity.
On the way to work.
Captain Prem Singh and his father taking a break.
by michael
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