Monthly Archives: November 2013

Villages, irrespective of continents and cultures, exude a certain innate deliberate peacefulness. Reminiscing about one such place located at the tip of Thailand, Sushma Sabnis, revisits a twilight zone of tranquillity and peace she once experienced in a quiet fishing village.

What sets a village distinctly apart from a city is the ‘air’. No, I will not get into environmental jargon, I am referring to the absolute un-hurriedness of any village anywhere in the world. When you are born and brought up in a city known for its ‘fast pace’ and a ‘city that never sleeps’ kind of phrases, it seeps into your system, biologically and otherwise. Hurry to be somewhere, go get something, to live, just hurry!

The twists and turns in my life have taken me to many such obscure nameless villages, perhaps its life’s lesson to slow down a little, like a village in the Na Saton tambon, Hua Sai district of Nakorn Sri Thammarat province, in Thailand, located at the extreme southern tip of the country, where I went for a training program many years ago. I refrain from revealing its name for I believe that I would be immensely disappointed if I went back there some day and found a ‘Thai tourism’ board welcoming me. Three hours drive from the HatYai airport, was this quaint little village with no English speaking people. Everything had to be explained in sign language and the ridiculous Thai-English translation booklet, every villager guffawed at.

When I would walk down the market area, overflowing with fruits, vegetables and all kinds of sea food and meats, I would wonder if it is a village at all. Then some cute Thai kid would run across with a kite in her hand giggling yelling ‘Oy yoo, tooolist’ – and then it would dawn on me, yes, this was a village and ‘I’ am the tourist spectacle for today, from the shape of my nose, to the colour of my hair and skin, and the texture and design of my clothes, my pronunciations would be dissected by every household that I passed by on the way. For a minute I might have mocked myself, ‘Yes you, silly foreigner, in a foreign land!’. Village folk however, are smart, and every spectacle eventually becomes boring.

This was a fishing village situated on the beach. Medium sized boats lined the empty white sand beaches. The fisher folk built their log cabins on the beach. These ‘baans’ made it easier to access the coconut trees, rear some poultry and provide an easy access to the ocean when they need to set out for fishing at odd hours in the day and night. The primary income was through fisheries, and the village folk were hardworking. Thai people are gentle people. They go about their lives in quiet reverence for nature and work towards preserving rather than exploiting it.

This village reminded me of Indian villages which I have visited. How simple and similar lives are actually across continents and cultures. Food, clothing, shelter and living a life in complete harmony with nature. After having led tiresome hard days, the women and children would gather around the beach in the late evening, singing folk songs and maybe if their city bred cousin was around, one would hear a guitar strum along. The waves, the guitar and the soulful melody of a sweet voiced Thai girl who dreams looking at the stars above, what can only be described as, John Denver’s ‘sleepy blue ocean’.

I learnt to catch crabs on one such dark night. Crabs come out in the nights on the beach to forage for food. Mediteranean neon blue coloured Neptune crabs, with their thick white chelae are a rare delicacy. One would find dark shadows after nine in the night running around with buckets in hand, grabbing these pretty runners. On a moon lit night, the salt water boiled crabs seemed more than just a bounty of the sea, it seemed like a feast prepared by the sea-god Neptune himself.

This is not a village one could spot on the Thailand tourism website or even on google maps. There is nothing in the name of monuments or tourist attraction. Thankfully, so far it remains unseen, hidden, perhaps that is the secret of its quiet beauty. In a country offering levels of package deals for enjoyment and ‘life-time’ experiences, this little village embodies silence and peace, just Peace.

Not only did its mud houses, art and music in its soul and the star lit skies of Hodka village cushioned him from the city’s jostle but also the barren stretch of Rann of Kutch made the writer shed his inhibitions. Johny ML shares with us his experience of this unforgettable place.

Let me wake up the Bacon in me: Some places are to be visited once, some twice, some never. They are to be cherished in memories. There are several places like that we never want to visit because the beauty of it lies in never visiting them. The magic ends when you get there. It is like personal relationships. There are very people on this earth who remain a mystery even after knowing them closely. There are places we learn in our history and geography text books which we don’t even dream of visiting. But one day, after decades you happen to be there, for some reason, professional or poetical or call it the poetic justice of destiny. Black letters printed on white papers become live and colorful reality, which perhaps you refuse to accept in wonderment. You walk into them as if in a dream. Kutch was one such place which I never thought of visiting. But one day a professional assignment took me there, exactly to Hodka Village and its wonderful Shaam-E-Sharhad Village resort.

Memories flood in. I was talking to Sushma, a news reader in All India Radio on 26^th January 2001. From the other end of the phone she asked me whether I felt any tremor. I looked up and saw the ceiling fan oscillating frantically. Suddenly I felt the tremor. The whole of North India felt it. By the time the tremor subsided, there at the north west of India in Gujarat, Bhuj had crumbled down like a castle of cards. As a journalist I was asked to visit the place and report; I was tired of journalism so I refused to budge from Delhi. But destiny took me there in 2009, another winter season but with the earth behaving properly. We drove from Baroda to Ahmedabad and from there to the Hodka village.

Narendra Modi was in his second term as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. He had brought in material development there and the signs of it were too visible. The first one was the broad highways and the industrial towns flanking them. Development has its ills too. The roads have divided the villages into two parts. To reach from one end of the village to the other split part, one has to travel kilometers. So you have vehicles plying in wrong directions braving death. Driving is a death defying stunt here. As you enter Bhuj, the rebuilt and rehabilitated villages come into your view. There are no signs of the devastating earthquake seen except for some broken structures waiting to be resurrected by property developers.

From Bhuj you drive towards north west and you reach the Hodka village. As you drive on, you think of eternity and as exclamation marks to your thoughts on endlessness, you see sophisticated windmills all along. Gujarat is an electricity surplus state and I am told that major companies and persons have invested in these windmills and they make good profits. Military trucks zoom past you and an occasional bike rider appear from nowhere and disappear into nowhere. Hodka Village lies at the end of world, you feel. The bhungas (conical huts made of mud and grass) tell you the presence of people. You enter into a pastoral land where people live in semi-nomadic ways. Today they are familiar with presences of visitors and tourists. They have learnt about the worth of their lives, their crafts and art as new patrons come in the form of tourists and visitors.

Hodka village has Halepotra and Meghwals as the major inhabitants. The Halepotras are said to have come from Iran via Afghanistan. And the Meghwals originate from Rajasthan. These communities dare the adverse weather and live in the most hostile terrains of Gujarat. Male folk often go out to graze the cattle and the women folk engage in household works and making craft objects. Women weave, embroider, do mirror works and appliqué. They also paint the walls of their huts. The men folk by the time they come back from grazing the animals, engage in music and dance. They use drums and string instruments as accompaniments and the high pitch songs celebrate gods, earthly lives, and more importantly hail the trials and tribulations of their daily lives. There is a lot of soul in their music.

Hunnar Shala, a consortium of architects working on endogenous architecture and urban development in Bhuj, post-earthquake days adopted Hodka Village to set up a eco-friendly tourist destination using the village resources, tribal knowledge and indigenous architectural methods. Named Shaam-E-Sharhad (where the sun sets), this village tourist resort is now the centre of Hodka village. Hunnar Shala has developed three Bhungas and seven tents with state of the art facilities (including western commode and hot water shower). Shaam E Sharhad, the completely village run and village managed resort provides the guests with Kathiawari vegetarian food and soul music. Under the vast expanse of the sky studded with millions of stars, staying a couple of nights there in the mud houses is an unforgettable experience.

Shaam E Sharhad is operational during the months between October and March. The peak season is between November and February. During monsoon, the tents are taken down, the interiors are preserved and the mud structures that form the architectural part of it are washed away. The villagers re-make it in the next season that begins by October. The summer months are too severe when the men folk take their cattle to greener pastures. Nights are fantastic and during the day time you could either do some village hopping, crafts shopping or after getting permission from the local military authorities visit the white Rann of Kutch, a vast expanse of whiteness, from where you could imagine Pakistan lying at the other side of the horizon. When I was at the white expanse where earth and sun make no difference, an ethereal feeling of space, what I did was just shedding my clothes. I stood like Adam in his private heaven before Eve came for a long time till I was made conscious of the possibility of my feet eaten away by the saline content of the earth, by friends.

Hodka Village and Shaam E Sharhad village resort are famous amongst the foreign visitors. Indian visitors hardly think of spending nights there. One may visit their website and do advance bookings. This village beckons me; even if I don’t go there again, the memories stay fresh in me.

In this village disputes are still settled by the village elders under a tree. A multitasking teacher teaches the village kids all that they need to know. Haunted houses, lost wells, desolate paths, jasmine flowers and the smell of wet clay- Sampigehalli is a village frozen in time, ironically located near the post-capitalist city of Bangalore. H.A.Anil Kumar hits a less trodden path to reach this village and comes back with the following impressions.

The old man sits there reading newspaper from beginning to end, from morning till evening. He claimed to have travelled ninety years in this village and that, perhaps, is one of the reason as to why he takes so long to read a Kannada newspaper. By the time he finished reading today’s newspaper, tomorrow’s would be in print! Yet, his village – Sampigehalli –just at the outskirts of North Bangalore never featured in any of those news columns. Never! He had been witness to this village throughout all the major world events of twentieth century, that incidentally did affect the city nearby but not his own village!

He sits on the Ashwatha Katte, the high-rise stone clad pedestal in the village center. A banyan tree and a neem tree are compulsorily grown within these 20 feet by 50 feet pedestal. This man is the oldest man in the village who has seen its transformation or the lack of it, in the light of the speed with which a sleepy township called Bengaluru has been metamorphosed. The tree shades of this katte acts as an umbrella for those who travel through this village, shelters those who take a siesta and acts as the court in the evenings whenever a village dispute is settled. Police have almost nothing to do with this village other than attend the village feasts and festivals.

There is a well next to Ashwatha Katte which is now defunct. Located at the heart of the village which has 250 houses, it used to provide water only to a privileged caste, when it was alive. Filling the well with mud also meant burying the caste differences, at least for now. It is located at the central point of Sampigehalli, en route to the next village. Interestingly the well does not belong to a family from within which nobody is interested to fight over owning it, since nothing grows on a well, one cannot build a deep rooted house upon it nor is its physical width worthy to be considered a site!

A road perpendicular to the main, but non-asphalted, leads to the temple twenty feet away and stops. There are fields on either side and it goes nowhere further. The only bus that arrives twice to this village, everyday, stops near the ex-well. Though most villagers make use of it now –the bus, not the well — people thought it to be an extravaganza when it first arrived only a decade ago. One of the young village dwellers, it seems, tried driving the bus when its owners were having chai at the local-dhaba. The bus was started, moved a bit and mowed down a couple of sheep and turned half-turtle. The boy went absconding till he was assured that there would be no case against him, for serving public transport without being paid!

The desolate mud house on the opposite side of the temple is left to further deterioration. Since a tantric and a mystic practitioner stayed in it once upon a time, nobody dares to make the mistake of claiming it. It is used only once a year when the theatre play that goes on throughout the night (bayalu nataka), is enacted. Extra actors who are not familiar with the village are given accommodation there. A deer and pigeons brought to create special effects, housed in the desolate house, it seems, had mysteriously vanished off during the night, that too even before performing their roles – as themselves –in the play. Their sacrificial remnants were recovered from the lake the very next day! The old man remembers everything, “my problem is I can’t forget, almost anything” he utters. He hints that the mystic-tantric quit his house because of the ill effects of his own magic.

The village celebrates prehistoric transport with such vigor that recently when a boy tried to commit suicide by swallowing sleeping-pills (no medical shops at Sampigehalli), there was unfortunately only one scooter in the village and the driver as well as the vehicle were ‘at home’ at that time. The sinking boy was tied behind the driver and rushed to the nearby Yelahanka township hospital, with lot of bullock carts and bicycles driving behind him in frenzy!

Sampigehalli is a village just ten kilometers away from Bangalore railway station. Yet it seems so remote that it seems to be hundreds of kilometers and a couple of centuries away from the nearby urban space. It also seems like a recently habituated nomadic settlement. Everybody knows the rest of the villagers by their names, even now while in Bangalore city you hardly meet familiar faces on the streets, even after driving the same route for a couple of decades!

With only one road passing through Sampigehalli, it is a sleepy location with a single-teacher primary school. Everything inside the school is visible to everybody outside, all the time.  More than the lack of infrastructure, it is the warmth that has held them together – the first grade students in the first row and seventh grade in the seventh row! During the first and the last hour of everyday schooling, the teacher becomes a sweeper, attendant, organizer as well as the head master. He is ‘the’ tutor for all the classes during the rest of the schooling time. The school, with all the colorful charts painted in enamel paints all over its outer walls looks like a tattooed-museum of its own self!

Popularly known for jasmine flowers everywhere, it has been called Sampigehalli (village of jasmines). Even the bright sunlight in the fields, added with the afternoon silence, apart from the occasional mowing of the cattle and recurring voices of the chicken; their foot marks on the rain clad ground, the typical smell of the wet soil, the children chasing the shadow of the slow flying two seater yellow aero plane from the half-century-old Jakkur aero drum nearby –all in all– comes to an abrupt halt whenever a plane crashes into the Sampigehalli lake. The planes seem to be hygiene-conscious; they are drawn to the waters constantly. Nobody dies in the crash, but villagers rush to drag out the wounded and own the weird plastic parachutes. They have known plastic more as parachutes than as contraceptives. The young cowherds – the result of the practice of bonded labor is still intact – mocking at both the notion of the abolishment of child labor; and attempting to learn swimming by holding on to the tail of a buffalo in the water, would be the only humans slightly disturbed by such surreal occurrences of almost all machine-birds crashing into the lakes.

The honge trees, whose shade are used as bed sheets in the afternoons by farmers, working in the fields to take a nap, are in plenty. They create a white flower-bed in no time. The above said old man of Sampigehalli is seen in the afternoon under the huge tree at the entrance of the village. Being the oldest in the village, he seems to be recollecting the memoirs of not only all the people of his generations who are dead and gone but also seems to be comparing the changing breeze, smell of the greenery as well as the industrial smoke which slowly is turning green into gray. He keeps staring at the quarried mountain to the eastern edge of this small village. The convex bulge of the mountain has become a concave pit in three decades. Even now, no matter how low the quarry and the politics around exploiting it has deteriorated into, the high rises of the city of Bengaluru is still visible from the quarry, like a fairy tale.

Quarrying of different kind has become the favorite time-pass preoccupation of the youth from around this village. Since the actual quarrying has almost stopped, the pit is filled with water and has become a second lake. One of the peaks is retained as it is, since there is a small temple above it and the whole setup looks like an abandoned film shooting set!

Sampigehalli is a village where if one walks for more than two hundred yards, he/she enters into a field, a barren land or a lush coconut grove. The community hall, which is actually an attachment to the temple, plays all India station throughout the day, in the age of digital, facebook and web world. This not only is music to the ears, but also is an indicator to the neighboring township Jakkur that the only luxury in this village is electrifying. Power cuts in this village, which is very frequent, is advertised through the pronounced silence in the otherwise noisy daily chores.

One need to be cautious while walking through the ragi fields, with occasional coconut, tomato, Malabar plants. Mischievous kids would have tied two ragi plants together so that one literally stumbles, apart from stumbling to the scenic beauty of the 400 acres of lake that is surrounded by at least three towns (Jakkur, Yelahanka) which is visible from everywhere in this village. The lake is the London Eye of Sampigehalli.

Sampigehalli is a village which has a natural visibility that most localities around Bengaluru cannot even withhold. You can gatecrash into well nurtured horse farms, nurseries etc. amidst the natural fields, which forms an oxymoron. A stranger is immediately identified herein while in the city nearby everyone you meet every day would be a stranger. The old man never sees Sampigehalli as it is. It is a palimpsest of at least nine-decades-metamorphosis of this village that he per-see-ives. What he sees is inevitably commixed with what he believes he has seen, forgotten, remembers and is hidden about it. During the night time, the famous Colonial- British-established-botanical Nandi hills are lit and visible from this village.

The house he stays is one of the last of its kind: made out of bricks, made up of the clay from the same lake, it seems to have certain site-specificity about itself. Most houses have tiled roofs and all tiles were bought from the now extinct tiles factory of Yelahanka, the neighboring township. In other words, the tiles have been reused and re-laid, like the memories of that old man does as a routine. Each house in the village seems like an extract from the museum-of-man in Bhopal:

They let you peep into the chiaroscuro-like-lit houses with most floors well ground by smearing of cow dung that keeps away all varieties of flies and their lord mosquitoes at bay, forever. Red-oxide flooring is a luxury for the Sampigehallites. The entrance is a cowshed and a semi-open bath room. If it’s raining, the burnt seeds of jackfruit travel directly from the bathroom firewood stove to your hands, even when you are a stranger to the whole setup. The humans and animals coexist, the ripened grains, jowar and other grains are dumped in, and the Rembrandt-like-chiaroscuro is the only light that defines the interiors.

One aspect about Sampigehalli is that it is not and more importantly, it cannot be a tourist destination. It is that palimpsest of memoirs that the old man offers and narrates about his very village that enlivens the place. What if this man is gone? I am yet to cross check as to whether anybody knows him, apart from me! He might actually be a personification of the memories that the village hides within itself. Otherwise, how else can one explain Sampigehalli’s remoteness, despite being just within the edge of the globalized Bengaluru!!