Ladybug's field notes

Arati said “My husband’s family had become Christians about 20 years ago…but then we returned to the Hindu fold about 6-7 years back”! We did not believe her...she hardly looked 40! But then, two women helped us to calculate. Arati got married at the age of 15! She already has sons in their twenties. We therefore better believe what she was saying. We were in Depaketa village. It was situated in the worst affected Blocks during the 2008 Hindu-Christian riots in Kandhamal district of Orissa. In the tribal dominated areas of Orissa, villages are mere conglomeration of many hamlets situated far away from each other. They are separated by forests and hills. As many as 10 such villages and 20 such hamlets make one Gram Panchayat. Sirtiguda Gram Panchayat in K. Nuagaon Block was no exception. Depaketa was one of the 17 hamlets of Sirtiguda. It is unique as the number of Christian families is almost equal to number of Hindu families. When the riot broke out, all the poor Hindus and all Ch...

This was in Thane district of Maharastra before the monsoon. I spent one and a half day in the field doing nothing due to mis-communication, in the very begining. I and my colleague spent about 36 hours in a village named Nandgaon. We slept in the open veranda in the afternoon sweating and waiting for rain and did so in the night too. As soon as the sun went down, we climbed up the hillock nearby and stood on top of the biggest rock available and we waved our hands like people stranded in uninhabited islands to get signal in our respective mobiles. My colleague was much taller than me so he could talk normally whereas I had to shout on top of my voice keeping the phone up in the air in loudspeaker mode just to convey home that I was fine (winking)! The incident early next morning was the crowning glory of this part of the trip. A cow followed me when I left for my nature’s call and I do not want you to puke by telling why it did so! But, yes Indian cows of Hindu mythology like variety...