A lens into India’s villages captures the humbling strength and vibrant spirit thriving far from urban clamour.

Browsing through reels, I came across a favourite childhood practice. As children, our first drawing was normally the sun, moon, sky, trees, flowers and a hut with a river flowing nearby.

Nature is our innate connection, which is why people often wish they were closer to Nature. It’s adulting that turns the desire for smaller, tighter knit communities upside down.

The dream dies, huts replace skyscrapers, trees replace roads and meat replaces flowers. Money becomes the mainstay and relationships are lost in the dust and heat.

Until one day, there comes a chance to see the India you wished for.

For three years, between 2018-2022, I travelled the length and breadth of the country for three coffee table books on CSR. I’d always wanted to write stories that had a positive impact on lives, and I thought this was my real life experience.

Alas, the dream breaker was the fact this was funded by marketing, which means all these stories ended as glossed over narratives, not the picture that calls for change. It was disheartening not to fully do justice to the remarkable people I encountered, their tireless efforts, and their heartfelt dreams.

It took two years to process the emotional impact of witnessing the India of my childhood imaginings, which, in truth, was no piece of cake.

All along, the people living on the margins, far from the city’s hardcore ways, helped me absorb my most humbling experiences in the villages of India. The headlines in international papers about these rural regions, which I had once questioned, now resonated with a stark truth.

Most of these villages were just a street of 5-10 mud homes, supporting each other, living a precarious hand-to-mouth existence, and some couldn’t even earn enough for a meal.

Some situations were particularly dire, such as in Jharkhand, where an elderly woman survived on a meagre INR 400 a month as a temple cleaner. She lived on the food that was donated by the temple or the devotees visiting the temple.

An entire village in Jharkhand made beedis (small hand-rolled local cigarettes), and for every thousand beedis, they would be paid INR 100. A group of women would spend their day making these.

A pregnant lady weighing a mere 40kg had a small child to look after as well.

An image that wouldn’t leave me for a long time, was a girl of barely 8-9 years old, wearing panties and holding a pair of scissors to cut the tobacco leaves with, roaming around the village. the unease at her condition didn’t leave me for months.

In another village, near closed coal mines, a group of women were taught financial literacy–how to save INR 5 daily. One of them even offered me tea from her makeshift stall – an offer I regretfully declined, realizing later that a small payment would have fostered self-esteem rather than dependence.

Eventually, the cumulative weight of witnessing such hardship led me to a forced departure from these projects.

Those three years reminded me that being born human and sharing the same land isn’t enough to generate a quality of life.

The world is a complex place, and our lives mysterious with little answer to many of the problems that we are facing. Yet, we live on.