Epilogue

Brigadier Ganesham Pogula

Finally introducing to you the driving force behind us Brigadier Ganesham Sir... He is the most dynamic and inspirational personality one could ever meet. One of the remarkable features about him is that given a situation, he critically analyzes it in every possible direction and infers a great deal of information from it. Every word from him is either from experience or by his analysis...which greatly affects our thought. One can gain an experience of years by spending 2-3 days with him. Every moment spent with him was enlightening.

And this is the whole team of pioneers who took part in this Odyssey

Pratap,Meraj,me,Shanti,Pavan,Ram naresh,KP,KG(Rakesh,Venki,Bala,Jeshurun,Joy,Subash and Tarun were missing)

The saga continues.....

On 13^th of June, we were back at NIT Warangal and all the teams shared their experiences. All of us faced more or less similar kind of funny and cryptic incidents. The next day we had a feedback session with Ganesham sir analyzing our pastoral experiences.
15^th morning, we continued our mission touring the next set of villages around Mulugu namely, Kamalapuram, Bussapuram, Jangampalli and Kasimdevpet of which we were assigned Kamalapuram, an agency area farthest from Warangal. Our accommodation was in the house owned by a woman,Jaya Lakshmi.

We can call her the Mother Theresa of Kamalapuram. She runs an NGO named Shakti Seva Society that basically works for women empowerment and eradication of child labour. The NGO has adopted about 20 villages and initiated about 30 SHG’s around Kamalapuram. It has eradicated child labour to a large extent, and there a lot of poverty alleviation done through well designed and coordinated social programmes that has brought down unemployment drastically in this area.

 

Moved by the pathetic condition of the adivasis in their village and with the burning desire to stand on her own feet, has started this NGO. She is an altruistic and selfless woman who relentlessly works for the betterment of the rural society . She runs a rural bridge camp for school dropouts providing quality education and inculcating good conduct.

Fine, let’s get back to our adventure. As the places we had to visit here were quite far from Kamalapuram, me and meraj were a JayaLakshmi Mam. (I have never driven a bike past my neighbourhood and now dirving doubles, on a main road at 40-60Km was little scary to me. But I shrugged off my fear instilling confidence myself saying, come on Teju not a big deal…you can easily do it.) We were accompanied by Bhaskar sir, (Pavan was the pillion rider on his bike) who is an employee of SSS.

The first place we visited was Thondiyala, 15 km from Kamalapuram. The village is the home to adivasis named Koyas (tribal community). Here, we find no house made up of bricks and mortar. You only find thatched roofs made up of mud and wood. We met a tribesman named Kanthayya here. Till this day, we find very few people from scheduled tribes who have completed their graduation. It is his sheer persistence that enabled him to complete matriculation in those days of Nizam’s rule when it was a rarity to find a school in your vicinity.

He has excellent grasping power.He explained us very vividly about the traditional agricultural practices and the culture they followed. 


Though we are in our early 20’s, the inertia in us always dominates the agile nature but, it was different with this octogenarian, he had the nimbleness of a young kid and moved around so quickly showing us the artifacts of his days. He explained us the preparation of Ambali and Gattika (staple food of the tribals made primarily from corn and barley) in great detail and he demonstrated the preparation of oil manually. He was a shrewd interpreter too. His mellow wisdom was quite influencing. He said, “Don’t go just by words children…take the opinion of others also and analyze, test and confirm the information u get before u proceed to do anything”. Aah! I thought this person is a masterpiece.

Malluri Ghutta Temple

Our next visit was to Malluri Ghutta , a small hillock. I had a wish to go to Tirupathi on a bike. Somehow my wish was partially fulfilled through the uphill bike trip to Malluri Ghutta. It is situated in the midst of a dense forest and has a temple of Lakhshmi Narasimha Swami. The priest in the temple narrated to us the story behind it. Legend has it that a king named Dilip Karna in 200 A.D got a dream in which Narasimha Swami asked him to construct a temple for him. In the similar way he told us a mythical story behind the incarnation of other Gods too.

It was an amazing experience going around the forest relishing in the verdant greens. It was so dense and beautiful, completely covered by branches, climbers, roots and trunks of big trees and they don’t even allow a single ray of sunlight to enter. We saw a tree trunk which has a circumference of 8m. And there was a small stream of water called Chinthamani. It is considered as a stream of great medicinal value as it flows down the mountains that are a repository of several herbal plants. We were not sure of all those, but the water was so tasty and our taste buds tempted us in going back to stream again and again to savour the elixir of life.

While returning we were very happy and thought every student has to surely go for such an internship. I felt this job to be more exciting than being just a traveler, more charged up than being a journalist and more knowledgeful than being a scholar. It was an experience that has made us aware of the plight the rural India faces and also about the diminishing culture of the ancient India. Conversing about all this with Meraj, I saw the speedometer and said, “Wooh…we are travelling at 60..65..and 70 km/hr.” For boys crossing 120km/hr is a great thrill but, for me crossing 60km/hr itself was an achievement.

That evening was one of the best remembered and treasured one of our lives. We went to a place named Regula Gudem, nestled in the thick forest, 5km from kamalapuram. There is no road connectivity to this place and we set on an adventure into an unknown territory!!! I will put down the verses of a beautiful poem by a friend regarding this journey…

BhanuTejudu Bhaggumantunna,

Karumegalu Kammukosthunna,

KatikaCheekati alamukontunna,

Kaalasarpalu tirugutuntunna,

Kaaru adavilo saagina ee sahasa yatra..

Vesindhi ee jeevithaniki o cheraganimudra..

It was an eloquent sonnet. Anyways this wasn’t by me…J Ok..Let’s continue with the saga:

I am not sure if the road is visible or not…But this was the way in which we travelled. We were driving on a Hero Honda and a Honda City and unfortunately half of our time went into dragging them in the sandy road. It was a very narrow road, sufficient for a bullock cart to travel and if we skid off the road, it would take 10 min to lift both of them and travel. And we slipped around 50 times in our to and fro journey.And a more horrifying thing was that the place is inhabited by a lot of snakes. It was a harrowing experience we would soon like to forget.

After the painful struggle we reached our destination-Regula Gudam. It’s a tiny village consisting 38 families in it. Not even giving us time to think about the unwholesome experience, it started raining. Adding to our woes was the fact that the village has no electricity. We were afraid and confused about how we would return. But, soon all those worldly pains subsided and we started our job of interacting with people knowing about their culture, tradition, food, livelihood and medicinal practices.

These people rely on hunting and the 170 acres land distributed by the government to grow food crops. (but the downside is that they don’t even know how to cultivate properly). There is one small govt school in the community and a tube well was constructed by Jayalakhmi Aunty with her own interest.

We looked outside and the rain hasn’t stopped yet. We were scared that we would have to stay the whole night there. They offered to play hosts for the night serving us their local delicacies, consisting of the just hunted wild boar ;).The very thought of it sent my head spinning ,and we politely refused. Their hospitality was very pleasing though.

People over here are so innocent and primitive, you will get reminded of Early Man seeing them. The women here wear a lungi and a jacket. And they don’t have access to basic medical care. Two kids succumbed to snake bite due to the inadequate medical facilities and they couldn’t even take them to a nearby doctor as they don’t have any transport facilities. SSS and government officials urge the locals to migrate to nearby cities and the government has promised to provide housing for them under the state government’s housing welfare scheme ( Indiramma Illu Pathakam). But none of them is ready to leave the forest land they are accustomed to and would want to find subsistence in their own forest with better government oversight in providing better education, health care and empowerment. What do you infer from this, Friends?? I think this issue qualifies for an interesting conversation that can lead to some purposeful initiatives for this ignorant people.

The rain receded… And we made our return journey. We were involved in similar exotic activities, this time in darkness.Even if we stumbled across a snake we would never know. Somehow our adventure was a pleasant success as we came back alive :P

This was a saga where in we embarked on an unprepared and aimless journey identifying our aspirations and dreams and to an extent were able to realize some of them with some impressive deeds.