Their chief occupation is tilling the land for the four months of the year that it rains . In the remaining months they  forage the nearby forestland for firewood. And they hunt down the wild rabbits in the scrub land or  stand for hours in the shallow little stream waiting for the fish to bite.  Of course, they also have the village carpenter, the tailor, the schoolmaster,  the witch doctor or shaman and several other craftsmen.

With  industry making inroads into their village now, several of them have been pulled into the twenty-first century and have listed factory worker, computer operator, electrician and even beautician among their professions!

The people live in clusters or settlements of 4-5 families in each and several scattered clusters to make up the entire village. There is no Main Street but there is a village post office,a kindergarten and primary school.

They also have  a very basic temple with three stones that represents their village idol ( MariMata), a Village Council (Panchayat) office and a  government sponsored ration shop that doubles up as the regular grocery store.

New consumers

With a cell phone tower in the vicinity, every villager has a mobile phone ( even though he may not have a regular source of income) . They all wear shoes on their feet ( something that was unheard of by their forefathers) .

They also watch television in their own homes and most have converted their traditional wattle and daub homes for red brick ones made out of bricks that you can see in the local brickyards.

Almost every household has some vehicle – a bicycle, a motorbike apart from the traditional bullock carts which they prefer to use while transporting things locally.

They also prefer walking and you can find groups of school children walking home in the midday sun. While all of them have abandoned their traditional garb of loin cloth for the men and simple wrap around saris for the women, there are a few people like Ananta, the wizened old man who likes to sit astride his bullock cart with a 1 litre Coca-Cola bottle which he has recycled to hold his supply of water.

From A(bje)  to B (ombay)

Two months ago B, one of the young girls from the village came home to help us with the housework. She needs to collect money to get married and we need an extra hand to help around. Since it was her first trip ever outside her village, I was apprehensive about her reaction to the big, bad world of Mumbai. My fears proved pointless, I soon found out.

She sat quietly all through the two-hour ride home and walked into the lift of our high rise  with confidence. She was equally at home with the indoor toilet, the refrigerator and the gas stove.

I asked her  if she had  brought her toiletries along with her and wasn’t surprised when she said that she hadn’t. But I was surprised when I asked her if she required hair oil and she said ” No I don’t use hair oil.”
There were more surprises in wait for me : like the comfortable way she munched away on her first ever Mac Fish and Chips on just her second day in the city. I was equally shocked when she said that she is used to eating Chinese Noodles in the nearby township near her school. But what really shocked me was when I asked her if she needed any sanitary napkins and she said ” Yes, I use Whisper.”

That’s when I realised that the average middle-class consumer is not the urbanised Indian living on the outskirts of the city, but the ordinary villager living in the back of beyond.