SO FULL OF LIFE

Sugarcane smile, made me happy, it'll make any one happy

She has seen better days, now poverty written all over her and yet she is so full of life, full of giving. Nirmal Sindu and i landed near her hut after a long and tiring trek. This is Wynad, Kerala, going there next week.

forgot her name, she made kattan kaapee for us it was a life saver, and said if we can wait for half an hour she'll catch some fish from the river and prepare lunch for us.

No, thank you, said Nirmal earnestly, you have already been so kind and generous. And she refused to accept any money from us. We just sat by the river and relaxed in her company for an hour and left.

Their life is not easy, misery and suffering right since the day they are born. Yet they know how to smile. This is poverty by design, this is misery by design, they are condemned by the society.

Racism of the worst kind. Its a very clever system. They accept cast system as their faith. They embrace poverty misery and suffering as religion.

India is a cursed land. India will never come out of misery even if we become the next economic super power.

we will remain miserable for ever. We seem to love our misery. Any country where people flee at any given oppertunity is a cursed land, another example is China, where you see oppression of the worst kind. All the flag waving Indians who shout, 'Mera bharat Mahaan' would flee given a chance, and i don't blame them. The conditions are so miserable.

She is smiling through her Ghunghat (veil), She invited me to her house, a mud house, this is the exterior

Do i feel miserable not living in a penthouse ??

Look at this.

I said WHOA !! when i entered

Ha ! this is joy. Just a mud house and the whole thing would come crumbling down just by leaning on it. Look at her interior design. This is love.

You did this all by yourself ?? i asked her

Yes she said, handing me a small mud pot of some fruit juice, she was beaming.

This should get in to an international Interior design magazine i thought.

This is something. This is so full of life.

Hey ! where is your smile ?

Here it comes, these are the farm hands of kutch

i would not smile with such a load on my head. Poverty becomes a way of life. Nothing stops them from feeling good, Indian movies play a big role in their lives. They want to be like movie stars. And they have thir own fashion. Some traditional and some new.

Anything, a piece of jewelry, new clothes, to make them feel good, to make them less miserable,

they flaunt it. i can't measure their joy by my yardstick.

i don't remember what i told her in my broken Kannada that made her laugh. It takes very little effort to ease the situation and bring some lighter moments. i am a clown always. i reach out and touch them.

Some new pictures in PASSION GREEN, PORTRAITS and BLUNT KNIFE, you can find the links on the side bar right under the clock, i don't like posting just pictures, wanted to delete these blogs, i am obsessed with the page design, so they stay.

Traveling again on herbal medicine trail, just for information that could be useful for my friends, going on a forest trail next week to Coorg and Wynad.

All my love