We have started a debate with in our rural tourism group on different aspects of Rural Tourism and what we offer to our stake holders (tourist and local host families). The first topic we picked up was Social Values you learn in Rural India.

Hypothesis - The social fabric and personal relationships are valued and preserved better in Villages Vs Urban population

Instances considered to discuss the hypothesis

1. In event of death – The whole village (translate to neighbourhood & relations in urban setting) comes to grieve and spend time with the family
2. Celebration like Sawa Mani – An event where a family hosts guests to come and eat from the 50Kg (1.25 man)  of prasad they prepare. In villages, you will see almost the whole village coming and eating the prasad and also taking their meal with the host family. A very regular affair in villages. In urban settings, we hardly call for such open gathering, and when we do very few people appear.

Me – I played the devil’s advocate and summed up that it is not the social values, but free time and access to free meal for which villagers attend such events. And the debate started

O.P. Tiwari & Akshay Pareekh contested this assumption. Irrespective of the time at hand, the visits are made more to maintain relationships and express genuine concern. In a village people are more connected to each other for needs and day to day activity. Even the open market / shops are not so well developed, so if a household gets some extra guests, they even borrow chairs and Khat (rural bed) from neighbours. Many people still do barter in their agri / milk / services (Barter at Devrala) amongst themselves  instead of open market purchase.

Me - So do we need to maintain such relations in urban setting, when we don’t need each others help?

O.P. Tiwari & Akshay Pareekh – No. It is not just need based. The villagers cherish the closeness they share and participate in each others functions and moments of grief.

Me – Life in Urban India is hectic and travelling time is also more, dissuading peopel from attending. Does not mean we don’t care.

O.P. Tiwari & Akshay Pareekh – Again no. Urban India has started giving more weightage to work/professional relations, and less to personal and family relations. If an office colleague (or better BOSS) has a function, you attend, and miss out on functions at home.

Me - I thought about it and realized that it is right. We end up justifying that the office colleagues are closer friends of mine than the family as i spend so much time with them. This argument is partially correct, but only “Partially”. The fact that we don;t get time to spend with family / neighbourhood/ friends relations in general gives a bigger reason for us not to ignore such functions. We go out of our way to attend some conferences and professional functions, but find an excuse (typically work) to avoid attending even local city functions.

I concede we can learn about “Lost Social Values” from the villages after all. However, it does not make Rural India “all right” and urban India “all wrong” on personal Vs professional scales.

We postulated another hypothesis

- Rural India gives so much stress on personal relations, that it tends to ignore the professional commitment needed in employment

We will continue this debate in our next post.

I recently developed a fancy to wear nice leather Jooti (A village made shoe, with a peaked end) and asked my colleague “Arjun” to take me to a village cobbler. He introduced the cobbler as “the family cobbler” for his dhani (the group of houses belonging to same family at the farms). I asked him to explain further.

He told me, that at every harvest, the family invites this cobbler to pick up all the left out grain in the field after the mechanised harvesting. This grain (possibly from 2-3 of such dhanis) is enough for the cobbler family for the whole year. In return for this grain, the cobbler repairs all the footwear of Yadav clan of respective  dhani free of charge.

I realized that i had seen the most traditional “Barter System” in action. I also appreciated the efficiency with which the post-harvest waste grain in the field was utilized in a commercial chain at no additional cost to the farmer and the cobbler got his annual grain stock by putting in a few days of field labour and servicing the client with his skills.

This season we had identified a new farmer location at “Bhandarej”, a small village in Dausa district of Rajasthan. In march we had an opportunity to host some of our international tourists at Bhandarej as a Break-in group. The guides accompanying them have been to many of our older locations and understand our value proposition well.

They gave us a very positive feedback about the family. They only had one complaint “It was very crowded, as if the whole village was there to see them.

Our local resource person had explained about the curiosity factor to the tourists and they were very understanding and in-fact enjoyed it as well.  It is important to brief both the host locations and the tourists about the “Curiosity Factor” and help them enjoy the attention and take the responsibility of leaving a good impression….