Ladybug's field notes

There was a perfectly round hole on Baske’s forehead! Yes. a hole. One that caught my attention the moment I saw him. I thought at first, he was in the army and got a bullet injury but then rejected the theory the next second! Nobody would probably survive a bullet injury that is exactly at the middle of one's forehead. When I visited him, he was sitting on a charpoy in his open yard, legs folded close to his chest. When he squinted his eyes to look at us it seemed he was annoyed but, then he smiled at my uncle accompanying me. Baske seemed as old as my uncle but it is difficult to guess the age of any peasant in the countryside working in the field for 10 hours a day from the age of 10…they all look over 60 the moment they reach anywhere near 40. I was in his village working on a project to understand whether tribal culture itself keeps the tribal away from modern medicine. As you can see, I was checking a theorem deeply rooted in the colonial-urban mindset. My uncle t...

--> A population of 1.45 million, 598 Gram Panchayats, 9 Blocks and only 3 Block Development Officers (BDOs), one of whom I met recovering from a tell-tale sign of a hangover and lying in his courtyard on a sunny winter afternoon. We reached his office and was quite taken aback by finding him on his cot in the backyard of government quarter instead of the office. I was in Uttar Pradesh  trying to satisfy my curiosity regarding what keeps UP at the bottom in NREGA implementation. Now don’t tell me you do not know NREGA. You will be hanged, drawn and quartered in the present government’s raj if you don’t. After all the current political party in power has beaten and keeps beating every willing and reluctant drum available to announce the program that at Rs 390,000 million has the single largest chunk of allocation and is second only to defense. If you are part of the middle class paying tax diligently like me (just because the tax norms are becoming tighter a...