“It’s a prescription from the disease, to the diseased”, I wrote when thinking about decarbonization, in the context of “us” from the developing nations, prescribed to by “them” the developed nations. Sitting in the far-away mountains of the Himalayas, on the mud-plastered verandah of my village home, the lens has zoomed in, and I have become “them”- the disease and my village the dis-eased. Today when i see the disintegrating population of my village into a few old houses with few old people - a effect of “palayan”- migration motivated by the search of- education, employment, aspirations, convenient lifestyle, sometimes in that order, sometimes not. When i see the morphing of these few old houses into concrete boxes with metal lids, when i see the hazy-ignorant understanding that i am left with of the deep, collective knowledge of the village, when this is what i see my reflex remains to present solutions.

But soon i find myself realizing how no matter what the solutions are but this very act cuts my experience from its long line of causes- many of which are very local, sometimes national and suddenly creates it as an isolated problem that i begin to look at in the background of some or the other global or national cause(climate change, hyper-consumerism, communalism etc.) justifying the urgency in which it needs to be resolved, suddenly the scale has changed disproportionately. The nuances of the local & the personal, flattened out, the sense of “time” hijacked.

Today if i even try to imagine why would an urbanized population come back to the village and if they do, in what way will they engage? will they inflict what was inflicted unto them, under the sweet name of urbanization. i try to imagine why would homes still be made of stone and mud, when they cycle of its maintenance and the feasibility of its sources and the value of “time” has all been changed, weakened and exploited. i try to imagine how someone like me, exposed early to the cellularising world of a modern city- where the individual’s consciousness, development, rights  are to be of the highest importance and everything else a derivation of it- can even begin to value the collective consciousness, knowledge of a village, slow cooked and assimilated over generations, authoritative yet tolerant sometimes, messy and violent at other times.

So should it then be left to take its course, hoping for self-organized forms of resistances and rethinking to emerge from the within, by them, for them. Maybe yes, a healthy community can think, it can resist, and it can figure its own priorities, the only value the disease can provide the diseased is to be let open, to present itself in its most constrained and un-harmful way for its own dissection, for them to see what filth lies at the heart of it. For them to see through the eyes of the perpetrators and best figure for themselves not just their defense but their action forward.