Shades of Being Alive

Seeing villages as a cultural reality and not just an infrastructural setup is the foundation of Gramya Manthan. The first thing most participants notice is the ‘lack’ - lack of toilets, lack of roads, lack of hygiene. Only gradually the abundance seeps in - richness of culture in the village. When the participants interacted with the culture of the villages, they by default connected with their own culture. 3 of the participants shared that while they served friends from the village during Daawat, they remembered how they organised and served at community events in Kerela or in Gurudwara in Punjab. Yash, one of the participants remembered how he missed the sparrows in his balcony in Delhi. Every participant came back feeling warmth and love from the way they were hosted in the villages - more than the discomfort of lack of facilities. The question we held was - ‘Will I be able to host the friends from the village in the city, in the same way they hosted me?’ With dismantling

I have come to believe that one can learn way more about systems thinking from the village than from any book or any modern facility. Its visible in daily actions. Take, food. Crops harvested from fields, stored for household use, cooked and eaten or eaten uncooked. The inedible remains (like vegetable peels) go to the cattle as their food. That food from cattle becomes poop, which in turn is made into manure for the fields. To let more food grow. Take water ponds. Most villages have had a tradition of maintaining ponds. Annually they desilt it, using the top layer of soil for repairing their mudhouses. Water and housing system, interact with each other. Local awareness, limited resources unleashed deep systems thinking and doing in the village. It has taken a great deal of schooling and ‘working’ to take local systems awareness away from us. The other reason has been tyranny of convenience. We have traded awareness with comfort. In the Systems Thinking session in Gramya Manthan, part