YEARNING FOR A VILLAGE LIFE – AN URBAN FANTASY

Most of us living in the cities have no idea of the hardships faced by people living in the villages in India. As electricity, broadband connectivity, healthcare and commuter services reach our villages I have seen the living standards improving tremendously in the last 3 decades, but life is still not as rosy as in the picture postcard villages of Europe. Still city folks have long dreamt of a cottage in a village, a fully furnished air-conditioned one naturally, by the side of a flowing stream with a large flowering garden and a rich vegetable patch and lots of chirping birds and a wide variety of butterflies!

Yes all this can exist in reality but it will also come with barking stray dogs, wandering stray cattle and at times wild boars and a rampaging herd of blue bulls (Nilgais). We have a small farm at the outskirts of Lucknow in a place called Bakshi ka Talab. We have had this farm for almost three decades and though we may not know all the villagers in our village by name, but they all know and recognize us and our children. The fact that Neeta, my wife and I are both doctors also helps and we become their nodal persons in Lucknow for any health problem, particularly health emergencies. 

Jack fruits on a tree

We have 3 ½ acres of cultivable land where we grow wheat, paddy, vegetables and fruits. We also have 58 mango trees and 2 jack fruit (kathal) trees in our mango grove. These are massive trees, all more than 40 years old, and offer an excellent canopy for family picnic and summer mango feast. We also have a massive Banyan tree on one side, 10 Eucalyptus trees and a skirting of 50 Poplar trees, which we have planted and which have gone up in no time to kiss the sky. Everyone who understands farming advises us to cut these trees and sell the timber and plant new ones, but we simply love these trees and they were never meant for earning money, and so they stay.

We also have a pond, and initially had fishes in it. We purchased tiny carps in hundreds from Kolkata, got them delivered in Lucknow by train and set them free in the pond. We enjoyed seeing them grow in size for some time and also sold them in the market, but three years of successive drought caused the pond to dry up and this adventure of fish farming had a sorry ending.

While life in cities ground to a halt in recent weeks, a social media trend known as "cottagecore" has been thriving online, drawing a young, cool crowd to the English countryside. At its heart, cottagecore is a romanticised interpretation of countryside life. These new influencers are girls dressed in gingham who frolic among bluebells, knead bread in moss-covered boltholes and tend to organic vegetable patches. In the cottagecore universe, there are no phones pinging constantly with updates, no urgent work emails, no evenings spent responding to the onerous demands of a tyrannical boss. In fact, there is no labor beyond domestic, and workaday tasks are completed with a gauzy sense of fulfillment. Each pie appears to emerge effortlessly from the oven with immaculate golden brown lattice crust.

A picture postcard cottage from Instagram

Cottagecore has really found its niche since lockdown began, with the hashtag currently garnering 245,000 posts on Instagram. A common theme running through the posts is self-sufficiency. A TikTok user called @realstadt_ has posted a series of dreamlike videos: one making dandelion honey, a vegan alternative to beeswax; another, kneading a "braided bread loaf" from scratch to the backdrop of tinkling harp music.

While in recent years, platforms such as Instagram have become a breeding ground for millennial foragers, bakers and farmers alike, all keen to spread the pleasure of living simply, it seems time spent in lockdown has fast forwarded this hankering for "The Good Life". Real estate agents in U.K and Australia are reporting an increase in enquiries for rural properties, as people start to think about alternative lifestyles now home working has become the norm.

Ms. Abigail Janine is a 24-year-old cottagecore influencer. After dropping out of university, where she was training to be a nurse, she found solace in the cottagecore community, and posts regularly to her 10,700 Instagram followers from her home in rural Colchester, UK. "It's the idea of living in what you create – escapism from the fast-paced environment we all live in," she said. "My mental health has improved enormously after making the slow lifestyle a priority." This lady has a style which attracts me; one of her posts is a video entitled "the art of slow living", a 15-second clip of a small snail atop a sun-drenched rock – a reminder to "rebalance your energy and remember relaxing is far from a waste of time" – while a soothing piano melody chimes in the background.

There are many like Abigail who crave for her lifestyle but don't have access to the natural world. The urban middle class in India is trying to buy this! You too can dream of this but before that remember getting some natural air flow and sunlight in your home by opening curtains and windows and potting some indoor plants can help improve air quality, lift your mood and reconnect you with nature. Try this as the first step, don’t rush to buy a farm patch.

We have purposely refrained from constructing a farm house in our farm because the purpose of this project as not to have a holiday home. We wanted our children to understand the journey their food takes from the farm to their dinner plate and to appreciate the effort that goes into this process. We were not planning to bring up an enviable property, nor were we planning to grow crops and trees. We were planning to bring up two children and let them grow into sensible and compassionate human beings, deeply rooted in the realities of life and yet aiming for the sky. This farm, I must say, has served this purpose admirably and so every Diwali we go there in the morning to offer puja and distribute sweets and gifts to all those who work there and toil it out. This is our way of saying ‘thank you’ to all these guys.

In all the hustle and bustle of daily life, we may not regularly visit the farm but it remains an ideal stress buster in our life. It is certainly not a profit making venture, but it sustains itself and the people who work in it. And it gives us a lot of joy!