Aparna Karthikeyan is a storyteller and an independent journalist. She volunteers for the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) and has written for them, as well as for The Hindu, The Caravan, The Wire, Scroll.in and other publications on culture, books and livelihoods. She has authored books for children, and published short fiction. She lives in Mumbai with her husband, daughter and dogs.
Let me tell you a story. Make that ten. Stories of everyday people who do extraordinary things to earn a living-like Soundaram, probably the only woman to own over half a dozen of the fiercest and finest stud bulls; Kali, perhaps the only male dancer who is accomplished in both Bharatanatyam and folk dance; and Tamilarasi, only the second girl to perform in an all-male, all- night folk theatre. Then there is Rayappan, who climbs hundreds of palm trees every week; Selvaraj, the nadaswaram maker, who makes wood sing, Krishnamoorthy, who has created ten thousand sari designs by hand, and Zeenath, who weaves exquisite silk mats on a floor loom. There is Kamachi, who has spent most of her life dancing on stilts, with a dummy horse strapped around her waist; Chandrasekaran, the sickle maker, who gets iron to yield to him; and Podhumani, who coaxes the parched earth to bear a crop, rushes back home to cook another meal for her sons and her husband, and is back again on the field, to put food on your plate and mine. Though 68.8 per cent of India's population lives outside its cities, the rural has been steadily forced out of the nation building process and our imagination. The rich get richer with land, water and resources snatched away from the rural poor. This savage inequality means that a minimum wage worker in rural India has to work 941 years to earn what a top paid executive at a leading Indian garment company earns in a year. Privileging and pandering exclusively to the urban elites will not just diminish and destroy the rural economy. What future does a country have if farmers who subsidise the country's milk and meals continue to be financial martyrs; artisans who stitch the rural economy together are systematically marginalised; and artists who perform about a glorious past are sent home to an uncertain future?
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