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I was listening to an old In Our Time pod-cast about anarchy a couple of days ago and it made me thing that Hunar Ghar is maybe a bit anarchic. I don’t usually ever think about what kind of system or rule we advocate, we just get on with being Hunar Ghar and making it better for everyone, but a few things resonated, not so much the negative attributes (anti-state anti-government etc) but the positive ones that anarchy stood for at the end of the 18th century. As told by John Keane, Professor of Politics at Westminster University, in the pod-cast and hastily transcribed by me,

Anarchy stands for the self disciplined, self imposed rules among individuals. They don’t stand for organised government over them…  the rejection of all false gods such as organised institutionalised religions, the opposition to the wages system, labour market … the strong sense among anarchists all seems positive. Individualism, self imposed judgments, reason, cooperation, love, mutual aid, came to be associated with the identification, closeness and simplicity of nature.

It’s not to say that we’re anarchist or anything else-ist, but it is interesting to see how some of the values we have come to develop resonate with the old anarchism, before 1970′s punk hijacked it and made it synonymous with something rather less peaceful than it used to be.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow Deepak, Rajkumar, Preeti, Nanadlal and Ajit are at MGIS for staff capacity training. I was there yesterday but came back to Udaipur on the train last night. Unfortunately Ajit has been feeling a bit rough and yesterday morning when we woke up in the hotel he was running a fever, so I went with him to the government hospital across the road. I’d not been in a big government hospital before so that was a bit of an experience but they had taken good initiative when designing it; all the corners in the the stairwells, usually a favourite place to spit paan, a staining red chewing product, had tiles with images of gods on, and no-one will spit on a picture of a god.

It turned out Ajit didn’t have malaria or swine flu but just a gastric inflammation and he went back to the hotel to rest. I was initially a bit annoyed that I was missing time at MGIS but it meant that Deepak had to take complete charge of the situation, and he did so very well indeed. He is really developing into a fantastic coordinator. It is easy to see a marked different in him every time he goes to MGIS. Preeti, Rajkumar and Nandlalji were similarly inspired and I’m sure two more days there will really help them.

It’s so important for them to see in action what we talk about in teacher training sessions, the harder thing will for them translate it into their own actions at Hunar Ghar: How do we create what we see there? But it all slowly slowly helps with their understanding.

I met with Pascal briefly at the end of the day and he confirmed my starting there as a learning initiator. I’ll start applying for my working visa as soon as I arrive back in the UK at the end of October, so all being well I’ll start at MGIS in January. Can’t wait!

I’m off on Sunday and today I was feeling pretty sad about it. I love being here, I love what I do here, I don’t want to leave here. There is a simplicity to life here that I thrive in and I cannot find it anywhere else. Even a simple life in the UK is so fast and complicated it seems. I had to virtually tear myself away from the village today. I’m still not sure why I didn’t stay the night there and I have that awkward feeling inside right now which I get when I don’t listen to my instinct is telling me. I get torn sometimes between what I want and need and a sense of duty to other people and other things, and I find it hard to decide between the two.

Although I will miss not being here and miss my friends and family here I’ve got a nice journey ahead of me hopefully hitching from India to Japan before flying back to the UK. And although my quality of life here really is very very good for me there are definitely some things that it doesn’t provide me with; apple crumble, rhubarb crumble, blackcurrant and raspberry crumble to name but three.

In the intervening days we are off to MGIS, then I’ll say my farewells in Udaipur, then I’ll spend my last two days in the village before taking a train to Amritsar, on the border with Pakistan before crossing over on Tuesday. This year in India has probably been more important for me that I will ever full appreciate. I do know that each time I spend time over here my thinking changes profoundly and always for the better. Who knows what will happen in the future but now it is hard for me to see a time when I will ever be able to spend so much time at Hunar Ghar as I have done this last year, and that is a very sad thing indeed.

But things change rapidly, and next year I will be working at MGIS so my Indian life, I am happy to know, is far from over. It could still even be only the beginning, but I’ll leave it to chance and opportunity to decide that.

I’m pretty miffed with the village meeting. First Sharmaji, and thus I, who was travelling with him and seemingly powerless to encourage people to arrive on time, was late. Then only around 40 people turned out at the meeting, all men.

Sharmaji launched straight into an offensive defence blaming people for not coming to meetings which although true doesn’t negate the fact that he has only come once in the last 8 months, even though our agreement is for once every month. We then agreed to set a new Hunar Ghar committee by the 15th of September, which doesn’t actually address the reason for why people aren’t coming. One reason cited is that people don’t get paid for coming to committee meetings. I started steadily boiling away inside at this point(!) and I think I handled the meeting pretty badly, not picking up in time on some important points. The problem is, it is all going on in the local dialect and Sharmaji and Dhunji both launch into monologues which seem to be related to what the other person has said but it isn’t really and by the time they have gone on long enough the first point, the really important one, is lost. Good diversion tactics.

The issue as I see it is that certain people want the power of decision and veto but don’t what to put any work it. At this point I’m supposed to shrug my shoulders and say OK, well, they are my elders after all, and get on with being fodder in there games of politics. I really hate these politics. They are present in every community and every culture but I find them so petty and to a certain degree I get drawn in as I then have to think how can I take measures to protect Hunar Ghar. They on the other hand are only trying to protect their own interests, so really who and I to say that is right or wrong? Am I somehow more virtuous than they because it is Hunar Ghar that I am more interested in? Hunar Ghar may have value to me, but perhaps it doesn’t to some people in the community (at least it doesn’t when we keep refusing to build a cement road, shift Hunar Ghar to the main road,r build Dhunji an watch town on top of Hunar Ghar).

I also had to sit and listen to some people lying straight at other people in order to perpetuate their own false image, and hear others dress their ulterior motives up in rhetoric of thinking only of the best interests of Hunar Ghar. (Again, what some people probably think I am doing). [country-filter code="in" display="0"]

One such issue is that of payment to teachers of child labours schools in the vicinity. Their actual payment is Rs2500, but RBKS only give them Rs1500. Ash told our teachers about this when he was here, and this filtered through to one such teacher. He then complained at the RBKS head office and he was sacked for being a trouble maker. When the sacked teacher brought this up today, Sharmaji shouted at him today that he could ask the prime minister of India and he would tell him that in tens of thousands of schools the payment is Rs1500, but that simply isn’t true. If the teacher in question could then complain to a higher level, that person would then question Sharmaji, who would promptly slip him a few thousand rupees and the issue would vanish. Sharmaji then went on to tell everyone how Ash was lying, which isn’t much good. The problem is these games are all played with smoke and mirrors and people too devious for ay redressal to be of much use. I sat there silently, studying Sharmji’s face so I could understand its exact features and movement when he is lying through his teeth.

[/country-filter] All that was before it descended into a maul of various financial requests/demands. I was pretty peeved off by this, and said so, but all that got me was comments later on from Dhunji, when he led me and Sharmaji to the summit of the Hunar Ghar hill and again requested that I build him his boys’ club house and told him no, that I used to be polite and now I’m not.

That means that I will have to work on improving my patience, but at the moment I am at a loss for what Dhunji is planning and what to do about this issue.

So much, then, for a meeting telling people about Hunar Ghar, how great their children were doing, and what we plan over the next few years. Deepak did try at one point, but Sharmji rather than taking up that opportunity Deepak had created to use the meeting more constructively, carried on talking about money immediately after Deepak had finished speaking as if Deepak hadn’t said anything at all. And we wonder why many people are concerned mainly with money issues?!

Deepak and I both came away with the sense that the meeting had been a complete waste of time.

We’re either very close or miles away from getting a new coordinator, and it is impossible to ever know to which extreme chance is weighted. On Thursday a girl called Soma came to Hunar Ghar with me from Jhadol, the town where RBKS are based. Although some of her thoughts on ‘village people’s minds needing developing’ and education I differ with, I thought that her basic skills and nature were good. The issues where we differ can develop to conclusion over time, and I know that anyone who spends time with us and the village will come to agree with our views; hers are just based on cultural dogmatism without any enquiry yet.

Unfortunately her mother phoned me to tell me that Soma refuses to come back again, but from other sources I hear that in fact she does want to come but doesn’t want to live alone (Deepak doesn’t count apparently!) , or her mother doesn’t want her to. her mother did offer me her brother instead saying that he really wants to do the work, but considering I haven’t had a proper conversation with him, let alone about Hunar Ghar, I don’t know how he can know that. Still, I’m off to Jhadol tomorrow to meet with them all to find out what’s what, and then hopefully he will be totally brilliant and we can get ourselves that new coordinator!