Even after 60 years of independence and throwing off the British colonial and imperial yoke, India is still a basket case going round the world with a begging bowl and with 80 per cent of her population wallowing under the absolute poverty line and why?” Because the rapacious cities are growing grotesquely fat on the sweat, tears and blood of our toiling rural brethren.

“I earnestly exhort and appeal to the idealistic and self-sacrificing people in this enlightened audience to go and work selflessly in the villages if they want to discover the real India!” Stirring words indeed and they were uttered by a politician addressing an election rally on Bangalore’s National High School grounds.

A quick check through the telephone directory immediately on returning home turned up the interesting fact that the politician was staying in Upper Palace Orchards – one of Bangalore’s poshest, upmarket areas which could not possibly be called a “village” by any stretch of imagination, but that was neither here nor there. I had been exhorted to go and work in the villages and I was going to do just that.

May be mine was an unusually plastic and malleable mind, but I was already convinced that with my smooth talking city savvy and slickness, I was cornering the fruits of development while letting my victimised rural cousins mired in ignorance, poverty and squalor and I was weighed down with a sense of guilt.

For my bucolic odyssey (or misadventure, if you prefer), I chose a village in the interior, some 100 miles from Bangalore. I wanted the ‘locale’ for my heart-stopping rural action to be as far away as possible from Bangalore with its 97, or is it 98?) cinema theatres, sleazy live bands and other joints featuring all-night cabaret shows and other ‘risque’ entertainment – tut, tut.

I drew up an elaborate programme of selfless action in the village – I would sweep cowdung off the cobbled roads and build gio-gas units and usher in an era of appropriate rural technology. I would organize the exploited women into self-help groups and mixro-credit societies and free them from the clitches of kulaks and usurious money-lenders.

I would galvanize the indolent youth into dynamic action and make them the vanguard of an agrarian revolutionary arms that would overwhelm “the parasitic cities and establish gram swaraj of Mahatma Gandhi’s dreams’.

These and other revolutionary thoughts jostled in my mind as the rickety bus made its way to the village.
 As I alighted, a fierce mid-day sun was blazing overhead and hunger was gnawing at my vitals and I would have gladly given my eye teeth for a plate of hamburgers and a foaming mug of chilled draught beer.

So my wicked city ways were still with me, after hankering after rich foods and alcoholic beverages to wash them down! I told myself sternly that I was in the village to share in the trials and tribulations of my oppressed rural brothers and sisters and that I should consider myself lucky if I got some millet balls and thin, watery rice gruel.

But something odd struck me rightaway. The village was bereft of young people whose sweat, tears and toil were being heartlessly exploited, as the smooth talking politician had managed to convince me, by the city folk to grow grotesquely fat. Puzzled, I accosted an old man who was sitting on the verandah of the panchayat office chewing betel and thoughtfully appraising his gnarled finger-nails.

“Pop”, I asked earnestly, “where are the village young men and women?”The old man looked up surprised. “Don't you know,” he said, “they have all gone away to Bangalore.”