Monday, December 1, 2008

Experiences!!!

I have been roaming in interior parts of AP for one of my projects these days. This is precisely the kind of experience I was looking for when I joined PwC GRID. It again reminded me of my project trip for study of NREGA scheme for Social Entrepreneurship project. I have been talking to various people about how life is in villages? How they spend their days and nights and what are their favourite childhood memories...

On a different note, the other day I was wondering... When I meet my batchmates in a 10 or 15 year reunion at IIMB, how will I decide who is the most successful of them all... Will it be who is the biggest newsmaker, or the one with the fanciest designation or heftiest pay package? Then I came to the conclusion, that I will feel that the person who has done what he really wanted to do in life... and probably contnues to have that freedom of doing what he wants to do everyday of his life. He doesn't have the pressure of running round the clock to meet the deadlines. He can take a day off without asking anyone etc... etc...

Coming back to the original point, life's very different in villages.
People say villagers are poor...
They don't have money...
They don't have knowledge...
They don't have economic freedom...

But they have time...
They have health...
They have sharp senses...
They have experiences...
They observe things...
They have stories to tell...
They have friends to die for...

Lives in cities are at best going to be a series of experiences none which will have enough impact on our consiousness to last the lifetime. For an experience to enter into our consiousness as a fond memory, it has to be either very high impact event like marriage or it has to be a repeatative phenomenon and you have to observe it carefully, giving it a lot of time and thought.
Village life gives you the opportunity to do the later.

So do I believe that they have better life in villages than what we have in cities?
No matter how much I think, I don't seem to be able to find answers to this question...

The answer lies in answering the question: What makes the life fullsome? Breadth of experience and thinking? or Depth of feeling and emotions...

Today my heart is leaning towards emotions, tomorrow it will prefer rationality.

One thing's for sure... I no longer pity the villagers and I no longer feel as fortunate...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

//Today my heart is leaning towards emotions//

For once! :)