A snapshot of a vacation memory
It must have been a blessing to be born in the most geographically beautiful region of south India that’s more popularly known as “God’s own country”. However, to be cursed to leave the land looking for economic growth & employment elsewhere. I blame a few social factors for this, partially on the much-abused political theory also known as “Communism” which caused a development havoc kept the state from any kind of industrial revolution. The only business that survived in Kerala was tourism, religion and politics. Eventually Kerala is now a consumer state, Malayalee’s migrated to Gulf and every other damn place on the globe. However, the money kept flowing in for a variety of reasons : for no one could comfortably live there long, but it was and will be the best place to end your life – peacefully. I must say that it’s still today a very soothing vacation spot for many. It’s the only place on the planet that welcomes everyone equally and eventually shuts the door on you if you stay too long. Personally for me, it’s my favorite village that has stayed away from any cultural degradation & consumerism.
May 1991, Summer vacations: The Long Haul
We stayed about 1500 miles away from home and summer vacations was the only way to get away from the regular grind. It would take about 6 months of financial planning to pull off something large like this. About 25 years back if a middle-class man had to travel such a distance, it would take about 3 days of Railroad journey with a lot of careful planning. We carried home-cooked food, potable water and a lot of luggage. The railroad system had hubs from where passengers could take connecting trains. We changed trains in a central hub in South India which was Chennai. We were in Chennai on 20th May, as it turns out all the trains were full. The desperation of reaching our destination after a long journey made us board an open seating Unreserved compartment. An unreserved train compartment was symbolic of the organized chaos in the society. Yet when I look back, I remember that people were more kind then. As a child, I would find place in a kind person’s lap. Get to share their food and sometimes hear some nice stories, the whole world was a Disneyland without tickets.
As we reached our destination, we found there is a nationwide curfew as one of the most influential leader “Rajiv Gandhi” was assassinated in Chennai. It was the start of some worse times to travel, we were lucky to almost reach our destination. Personally, I was happy because I found that our vacations just got extended by a month.
Grandma’s Home
My paternal home is one of the places that has been very close to my heart, even though it was the place where I have seen some disappointing things happen in a family. It certainly is symbolic of the beauty of destruction that paves way for new creation to happen naturally. My grandfather was an army man, one of the most respected man in the village who had seen the world change from war to peace. However, he left us all early with a jolt that left a dent on the family’s affluence meter. The prior generation never saw a need to think about economy, there was no desperate need for savings and the kids barely saw any need to carry money.
Whatever it was then, it was the best I could ask for. I was the first child in the house and the only one who has known my Grandpa so close. I certainly had the undivided love,attention and pampering from everyone.
With whatever resources were available, I saw a perfectly self-sustainable model for peaceful living. The house was surrounded by about 2 acres of farm land. There were a variety of trees, plants and plantations surrounding the house that grew with minimal attention. There were enough vegetables around the house to support a large joint family for days. Additional farming was done to build contingency stocks for months that did not rain or had floods. Shopping for vegetables was so rare that we used to call the purchased vegetables as ‘English’ vegetables. Nature was abundant, but sometimes used to touch us in its own ways. I remember once in severe draught we cut open a papaya tree and to our surprise, it had few buckets of good water stored inside its trunk. The nature around was so resourceful in so many ways. Each season marked a specific morning activity, for example the summer season was for the mangoes to ripen and a morning walk would get us a basket full of naturally ripened sweet mangoes that could go on to the fruit collection for the day. It was helpful because a full grown mango tree would be close to 50 meters tall, even then a fruit would survive the fall as it falls on the soft grass bed and a damp soil cushion. As kids, we used to pick the fruit with that soil sticking onto it, just gently wash it and it was ready for consumption. Today I can’t let the kids eat the skin of any fruit for all the chemicals & pesticides are impossible to wash off. Many plantations in the world make a conscious attempt to keep the mango trees short for the need to spray chemicals & harvest them more carefully, as the mangoes are sold when they are not ripe. Why do we have to eat such fruits?
A typical village day
A typical day would start at about 5:30AM with my aunt walking over to the cattle shed to milk the cows. The chill morning breeze would bring the scent of fresh jasmine flowers from the garden that was barely maintained by the kids in the house. The garden would simply grow enough flowers to decorate the whole house, yet we would never take them off the plants unless there was a need to do so.
The cattle shed would always be clean. A slow smoking coconut shell with some spices & herbs would keep the bugs away, the scent of which would have filled the shed with a warm feeling of walking into a coffee shop. Those days, milking a cow was a much more engaging process. We had only two cows and each of them was uniquely named, my aunt would exchange casual pleasantries with them by calling them out. It was a magic to see those cows got up and prepared themselves to be milked, never ever showed any sign of laziness or discontent. The process had some intense exchange of consent between the creature & person who milked the cow. The quality of milk represented the positivism of the entire exercise. Hence, milking was a specializedskill that only certain people could handle. The cow always rejected unknown people and if there was an unauthorized attempt to access, it alw
ays ended with a kick on the person’s face or chest. If there was a calf, there was a conscious attempt to leave enough for the baby to drink.Freshly extracted milk was naturally warm and the cats in the house would patiently wait outside the cattle shed for the process to be completed, then they would follow all the way to the kitchen to get a share. The cats would gently rub themselves to the person handling the milk can to establish proximity, each minute the purr would intensify and any sign of delay would mean that they are ready to protest. The rest of the day events came in succession to generate valuable resources that kept the big family going.
Top Notch Self-Sustenance model
At lunch time, a family member would go in the garden to cut fresh Banana leaves on which hot food was served. Today it’s a proven fact that banana leaves have tremendous health benefits including valuable antioxidants. The food that was prepared from locally grown vegetables would be supporting all living things in the same family, there are never leftovers and always right amount of food is cooked.
Food is served for the animals is outside the kitchen, most of the homes have a deep vessel was placed outside the house for this purpose. We had one that was carved out of stone which served as the feeding spot for the cows. Every day the stone vessel was scrubbed and cleaned. All the residual food like banana peels, vegetables shells, leftover rice & cereals would go into that vessel. Since rice was the staple food, every day we used to have a few liters of hot rice water that was added to the stone vessel, today its sold in a variety of ways. Some animal feed was added to the hot rice water to make the magic concoction that was full of nutrition and yet economical. If that soup was tasty, the animal would let out a couple of moo sounds thanking the preparer.
The cows were let to graze in open and wild, we had a dog who would watch over the cows to see if there were snakes or wild animals that came wandering around. There were a dozen chickens who came down from the high-rise chicken coop to hunt for their own food, sometimes the kids in the house would feed them with grains, they used to simply throw a handful of grains outside and the chickens would uniquely identify a grain of rice or wheat among the million gravels in the ground with ease. Every day the kids in the house had a thousand things to watch, observe and experience.
The word cattle was derived from the French word “Chattel” which means property. There are a variety of social, economic and religious reasons that a Cattle should be protected. The best possible solution is to consider them holy, for humans choose not to destroy something only if it’s believed to be owned by a higher power. Apart from all the research study that shows that the milk production is increased when you name a cow and treat her as an individual, there are mystic powers that a cow posses. If there is a sorrow or death in the family, the cow knows and weeps for it. If there is a celebration in the house, they adjust themselves according to the schedule.
Well this was a mixed blog, in coming days I will expand into each section to make it more cloudy to read. If you have reached so far, I would like to express my heart felt gratitude for reading my blog. Thank you & see you again.
References
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/20-things-you-didnt-know-about-cows
