The village experiment!

AIM: The purpose of the experiment was to live like a villager, to immerse ourselves in that lifestyle.

APPARATUS USED: We (The two social scientists carrying out the experiment - Me and Manoj) knew no one in the village and we had no experience of this sort before. We worked for food, slept on sack bags and played Kabaddi for recreation.

PRINCIPLE: One of the things in my bucket list is to live in an Indian village for a year. I would love to do it right away but there are other things to be done like clearing civil services, making money etc. that have to be taken care of. Therefore, this time around, me and my friend (Manoj) visited a village in Tamil Nadu and stayed there for five days, as a kind of warm up for the eventual one year stay. The village we chose was Sethumadai, some 33 kms from Pollachi, near the Tamil Nadu - Kerala border.

PLAN/ PROCEDURE: The plan was pretty simple. Go to the village. Find a place to stay - preferably without having to pay rent. Find a job - preferably as an agricultural labourer. Survive for five days. Return home.

The posts that follow give an account of how this experiment turned out.