Exploring Rajasthan

Rajasthan: a place so over-exploited as a travel destination that even the aliens from Mars might soon be planning a trip there. This is the place my friend and I decided to explore for our first adventure as ‘nearly journalists,’ being just four months away from graduating from our journalism school.
As tourists, we always end up going to the most known places, and doing the most clichéd things. Rajasthan is famous world-over for the Thar desert that engulfs nearly two-thirds of the state, numerous forts, scrumptious spicy food and handicraft. But we decided to travel to some of the remote villages -- relatively unseen, mostly unknown.
Although we went during the winter season, the afternoons looked like any summer day. Vast stretches of barren land; the sun shining in all its glory in a sky devoid of any clouds; a rare skeleton of a cow or skull of a deer completing the tableaux.
There was always something new to learn about the people. We experienced first-hand the warmth of the villagers but also their obsession with caste and religion. Soon, we became used to first being asked what caste we belonged to and then being welcomed. Apparently, it worked for us that we belonged to the “acceptable” caste. Had we not, “it wouldn’t have mattered that you come from big cities, villagers will still not treat you well,” a very proud ‘upper caste’ Rajput told us.
Rajasthani men wear are known for the turbans, pagris in hindi, they wear. They have different colour turbans for different occasions, seasons and predictably...castes. The headmaster of a local school, with whom we stayed for two nights, wore an off-white turban because he belonged to the Bishnoi tribe, worshippers of nature.
He revealed to us that even if he was forced to sit with a “lower” caste man in a local bus, he would be careful to avoid him in the village. He also let slip that although he taught dalit kids in his school, he did not make any body contact with them.
However mostly, it is water, or the lack of it, that plays an important role in the villagers’ lives. We were surprised to see the people guard their only source of water – the rain-fed lakes – in December, a time when most of the lakes had nearly dried up.
We also saw a local NGO struggle to convince villagers to consider hygiene and build toilets. Through them we also realised the travails of women who had to tread for miles to answer nature’s call. Yet we also met a dalit woman who begged, borrowed and saved up money to become the first in her village to have a toilet.
In the ten days we stayed in the villages, we were shocked to discover just how different the rural India is from urban India. Into a territory just about 500 kms away from my hometown, in a country that’s my own, this was my journey into an unknown culture.