How did I reach this state of incipient activity? The first glimmer of hope came two days ago on Tuesday morning when I finally met Dilip Mishra, my summer correspondent from NRD. I had built up an image of an intensely earnest and inaccessible character of indeterminate age. It was a revelation, therefore, to meet a young man, enthusiastic and stylish, who smiled broadly and asked about my journey from Bombay. He spoke rapid and eloquent English in a high-pitched voice that always seemed on the verge of getting even higher. He told me that he was very keen to get me on board in NRD as he had a village requiring a microplan and he apologised for the bureaucratic hurdles presented by Sumita. In the meantime, there would be plenty of reading to get on with. "When you see the reading material you will heave a sigh of relief that I am not expecting you to have completed it within the week," he gabbled breathlessly. "These documents are extremely voluminous!"
During our conversation Sumita herself sailed in. She is head of the People's Management School (PMS) which controls Vikas Samiti's human resources, including the volunteers. She is altogether different from the army of benevolent-looking women I have seen around Vikas Samiti, mostly middle-aged and slightly frumpy, dressed in salwar kameez and perpetually looking a little harassed. Sumita, in contrast, wears trousers and has short hair. Her glacially beautiful face is set in a near-permanent frown and she speaks the cultivated English of the Indian upper classes, although her tone is deadpan. She reminded us that there was a procedure to follow and that she couldn't sanction my joining the NRD project until she had spoken to other departments. "But you are lucky to have an enthusiastic champion in Dilip," she said, almost smiling.
I was impatient at this stalemate, but reasonably confident of the full force of Dilip's enthusiasm behind me, and spent much of the rest of Tuesday lost in a book about the history of Indian forest policy. I am one of those people who feels uncomfortable jumping into something half-way through, and no matter where I tried to start browsing I kept realising I should have started further back and ended up rather lost and confused somewhere in the 1950s. I passed Sumita a few times during the day and on each occasion she pointedly ignored me. As I headed over the next morning to see Dilip, however, I capitalised on her faint smile of recognition with a pouncing "Any news?"
"About what?" she said, coolly bemused.
"About the project!"
"As we have already discussed, there is a procedure and I cannot contravene it."
She glided off, and I continued despondently to Dilip's office to discuss forest management issues. Half an hour later Sumita joined us, her brow furrowed as if she was about to deliver an unwelcome message. "It will be possible, of course, for you to work on a JFM project with Dilip, but I am not sure if this is what you are interested in."
"But that's what I've been trying to explain since I arrived!" I cried, exasperated.
"Oh," she said, genuinely amused. "You'd better take it then."
"Great! Is this settled then? You won't change your mind?"
"No, no," she laughed sneeringly. "It is settled".
I have no idea whether the delay in sanctioning the project served any purpose other than an assertion of rank.
*
Meanwhile, our volunteer community has swollen with the arrival of ten Indian students from the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) a college in Gujarat. They have come here for the first of three fieldwork components that make up a significant part of their degree. Their self-appointed leader appears to be Dhanwant, a highly intelligent 23-year old from Jammu, with whom I have already had long conversations with on a variety of topics. Karan, a 22-year old from Dehra Dun, is by contrast quiet and enigmatic and doesn't seem to blend in much with the rest of the group. My favourites so far are Lalita, one of the only two girls, and Arun Kumar a 26-year old joker from Bihar, a notoriously poor and corrupt state in the east of the country. Lalita is very bubbly and surprisingly forthright for a 24-year old Indian girl and lost no time in calling me an idiot, while later conceding that I was a "fun person to party with". This accolade was awarded to me when I accompanied the group to the Ambrai, an elegant outdoor restaurant on the shores of Lake Pichola, where Arun got drunk and insisted on treating me to dinner. His gesture was slightly undermined by the fact that, in his confusion, he only ordered one dish between the two of us and we had to share a Chicken Mughlai that was already on the slender side of substantial. Another IRMAn, Girish, a slightly bumbling 30-year old performed a lengthy Urdu ghazal (love song) for my benefit which, according to his running translation, contained phrases such as "Half close your eyes and drink in the unchanging scene".
They all left for their various field projects today, and I can't help wondering how they will fare. As far as I can gather, none of them have spent much time, if any, outside the urban middle class milieu in which they have evidently been brought up. I asked Karan whether he was feeling at all nervous about his spell in the back of beyond. "No," he replied with quiet confidence. "India truly lives in her villages. Why should I be afraid?" Commendably Gandhian, of course, but not entirely convincing!
*
My own feelings certainly allow some room for some apprehension. This has less to do with living in a village than a growing bafflement as to what I am expected to do once I reach Maal. I have made some slight inroads into Dilip's "voluminous" reading list and have browsed through a few JFM microplans, so I have a sketchy mental outline of my overall aim. This seems to be to produce a report, divided into various sections with names like “Management Plan” and “Technical Plan” that gives a detailed picture of the village and its relationship with the forest and identifies the area’s key development priorities with recommendations on how to address these. The mechanism by which I am to achieve this aim, on the other hand, is currently a near-total enigma. I have probed Dilip gently on this point, but perhaps not as much as I ought to have done. I can't rid myself of a niggling embarrassment that I may have missed some vital point somewhere along the line - in my reading, in our discussions or, worst of all, during our e-mail exchanges over the summer. Fortunately I appear to have a week's grace with which to sharpen my ideas, as Dilip has indicated that my first week should be used to make general observations about the village and get a feel for my new metier. All in all, therefore, I am rather excited and the unimpressive specimens in my stomach that pass for butterflies are only putting up a half-hearted show.
Next Post - Sunday 8th October 2006: Kojawara (will be posted Saturday 8th October 2011)
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