Fragmentation and Healing

N.B. This piece has been taken from my reflective writing journal and should be understood as tentative and incomplete :)

It seems that we are all here in order to make sense of things. We look into books, we look into each other, searching for what is out there, what is right - and maybe also, who we are. Each of these is important. But it is often the last that is most neglected.

What we need now, is healing. Healing at so many levels. We need to reconcile our divergent worldviews, our pain, our joys and our shared destiny. We cannot exist the one without the other. The suffering that we continue to inflict upon our own family by thinking that we know best, that we have the answer, that it is this way not that way is causing such rotten damage that we are, in effect both the poisoner and the poisoned. The question before all of us now is how we can escape from this vicious cycle of harming others and harming ourselves. Where does the healing begin?

When I was working in a small town in India I became sensitised to the fragmentation that was all around me. The town where I have been working was populated by around 5,000 people belonging to over 25 identity groups - Hindus (over 20 castes), Jains, Muslims, tribals. That each community has its own neighbourhood - to this I am not opposed. However, that they should be pitted against each other? That they should be positioned in a hierarchical structure which exploits and results in suffering and pain? That politics and religion should be combined as a means to lash out, prevent progress or spread disharmony? That I cannot accept or tolerate - and am open and honest that this is where I am coming from - even if this makes me culturally insensitive! But then I ask, "What happened to vasudev kutumbh?" Where and when was that idea thrown out to rot? By whom? And how dig must the people of this planet dig into their souls to rediscover it?

So where does this loss take us? Youngsters - merely 10 years old will insult each other on the basis of their identity: Hindu dog! Muslim pig-fucker! For these youngsters it can be funny - or perhaps even grown-up seeming to engage in a testosterone, power-display with each other. But this is no small joke. When the right wing Hindu-ist BJP party stirred up a conflicy between the Tribals and the Muslims, threatening to destabilise an age-old and peaceful co-existence over something that was strictly a matter for the Tribals and Muslims to resolve amongst themselves rather than politicising it! I felt a great deal of fear at that time. Perhaps because I knew that we, as the implementers, had created the opening for such opportunistic communalism through our activities. It was not the first time we had done so either. I learned: never, never, never fail to do the communal calculations in any community development work. Make it an explicit part of the considerations of what is being done and make as sure as you can that you have left no little stone unturned. But how do we become immaculate? Not just as individuals able to be mid-wives to new and more harmonious realities, but as a collective; as an organisation?

So these little tensions erupt now and again. Perhaps that is a necessary or inevitable feature of what is, more or less, a state of peaceful co-existence. I would ask: where do we decide to place the bar of what wrong-doing we are ready to tolerate? How much pain and injustice can we tolerate? Can we really tolerate any? What are the world and its many people calling out for? Clamouring for?

Which takes me to the old man I met in the Muslim Mohalla. We sat down to have a group meeting. To talk about the new water tank that was being proposed and for me to get a chance to meet some of the people that I would be living with for the next year and a half. An old man, with greying hair, a weathered face and wearing dark-grey shirt and pajamas came toward me and slowly squatted down onto his haunches. I greeted him: "Salam alaykum!" "Alaykum Salam!" he replied. I asked him how he was. He asked "What can I answer?" I asked him what did he mean? He told me of his family. A broken family. Sons that didn't speak to him. It was heart wrenching to come close to understanding how he felt. The world was not like it used to be. Children used to respect their parents. Now all they wanted was to be free. To be apart. There was deep loneliness and pain emanating from the old man. And I said, "I'm sorry. I understand what you are saying."

And then there was the lady from the Meghwal community who burst into tears while one of our volunteers was out investigating the relationship between women and water in her community. After a semi-structured interview, in which a local youth (one of our hero's) was helping out as a translator, the woman began to cry. The questions had been probing the problems faced by women in collection and management of water and the idea was that some of these discussions would help to highlight some of the usually unspoken issues faced by the women. The volunteer and the local youth asked the woman what the matter was: "In all my life, my own sons have never asked me how I felt! Never asked me what difficulties I faced! Never offered to help me fetch the water! Never asked me what could be done. Today you two people, not of my own family are the first to ask me such a question!" So much pain - would it have ever surfaced without those questions.

So the fragmentation - that we see on the news at the international level, that we see in our big cities, that we see in our small towns, that we see in our communities, that we see in our families - how deep down does this fragmentation permeate? I have come to locate it within the individual. I am fragmented, you are fragmented he/she is fragmented. Our minds are fragmented. Our souls are fragmented. We are full of contradictions. Our very process of perceiving is, the vast majority of the time, is fragmentary in nature. Our relationships with everything around us rise up out of us, connect to that which is around us, and feed back into us. Just like a loop. On the one hand we see ourselves as victims of the outer world. But why do we not also see ourselves as victims of the inner world? Why do we not see that it is our own way of being in the world that we have control over? That it is the harmony that we can cultivate within ourselves that will enable us to bring harmony into the outer world?

And this is why I believe that what we need now is healing and not 'development'. If we were to focus our collective energies on healing the people, healing the families, the communities, the Tribes, what would be the need for anyone to 'do' development? If people were living in harmony, helping each other to live; co-existing, co-learning and co-creating, then what would be the need for projects and institutions? We need to redefine what we call a vibrant economy. We need to redefine what we call politics. We need to redefine our very own selves and become part of a living process in which there are not people doing things to other people; only people doing things, for each other, together.

This line of reasoning led me to wonder. Could we have created the world we have today, with its various crises, without injustice. Injustice is what has enabled us to produce this mess. And it is the ceaseless denial of injustice that allows us to perpetuate it. But how does one remove injustice? What is the process to be followed? Yesterday I watched a movie about samurai. In it one of them said: you cannot kill the weeds that choke the flowers by poisoning them, for you will then kill the flowers too. But you can plant flowers that draw their energy from the weeds, causing them to wither and vanish. Does this work for our approach? It makes me think of appreciative inquiry!

As the dust settles...

Well, it has been a while now since I posted here! The dust is finally settling a little here at IDS and I feel that I have reached a comfort level where I can return to my blog!

I have not been inactive at all during this time! I have been furiously conversing, reflecting and also writing - it's just that none of it has found its way onto this blog. And there doesn't seem to be much of a way that I can do justice to the experience I have been having. I have started maintaining a journal using Tomboy on Linux, which allows me to link up all my reflections, reading notes, class/lecture notes, daily to do lists and so on with each other.

I have also set up a ning platform for our class (presently limited to just the 9 of us) after everyone agreed on it and have made a couple of posts up there as part of my reflective practice and also as part of the effort to get it up and running properly. There is much to learn about how my co-learners and I can and will function in this virtual space... There is, of course, at least as much to be learned about how we function in the real spaces that we share together...

In any case, this posting is merely to explain the absence and to point out that some slightly more consistent blogging can be expected here. I was thinking that, amongst other things, I could use this space for my meta-reflections - reflections on how I have been reflecting, learning and changing as part of the course. In the meanwhile, however, I will follow up with a few posts from the ning platform.

Also for an update, I have initiated a long with some co-learners a process for establishing a 'complexity' group. The remit is appropriately fuzzy at the time being but it is essentially supposed to function as a kind of platform for all those interested in and/or working with 'complexity' in any of its various guises to engage in dialogue and learning together... hopefully in order to figure out new ways of translating whatever emerges into new and more effective ways of being and doing... This should be most interesting (even though I won't be around to see it directly)!

Aside from that there is a 'Questioning Development' group (funny how that's been one of the labels I've been using in this blog for some time now!) set up by some co-learners that has started meeting regularly and this is generating some hot stuff for everyone to sink their teeth, minds and souls into. We seem to have quickly entered difficult terrain here; with one of the key subjects for discussion being around the need for deeper acknowledgement of historicity in development interventions and also the need for a deeper acknowledgement of the pain and injustice that has been (and still is being) meted out in much of the non-Western world as part a process that supports Western lifestyle and consumption patterns. Great. We will continue to delve into this, with all the pain and difficulty that it entails. There is much space to be held as we question the very notion of 'development'...

Which reminds me of what triggered me to return to this blog... I read just now, the following quote in a review of World as Lover, World as Self: A Guide to Living Fully in Turbulent Times by Joanna Macy (2007) on Amazon (see here) and thought it was really rather worth sharing with the wider world. It also makes me think I should be reading this book!

"Development is not imitating the West. Development is not high-cost industrial complexes, chemical fertilizers and mammoth hydro-electric dams. It is not selling your soul for unnecessary consumer items or schemes to get rich quick. Development is waking up - waking up our true potential as persons and as a society." (p. 132)

On that note, following are two posts that I had shared on the ning platform... Not perfect pieces, very much raw and unedited, but I've decided to share them nonetheless! So here goes...

Back to school!

After 5 years of living in the 'wilderness', of gathering experience and of learning from the immediate reality, I am finally back to 'school'. School, in this case, is the Institute of Development Studies located at Sussex University. My course, for those who don't yet know, is the MA in Participation Power and Social Change. I have blogged earlier about the questions I had on whether to go back to school? so I won't give more of that here... Instead, my take on what I've experienced so far.

Firstly, I have no regrets about coming here. It is proving to be everything I could have hoped for and more.

Academically, we've had a very light first week. Most of the time has gone into dealing with all of the formalities and getting us introduced to our courses. More importantly, than this, though, it has focused on getting us to know each other. For example, Robert Chambers' (of PRA fame) introductory workshop enabled us to meet all the 130 or so students, break the ice and lay the foundations for a real state of community! The sheer diversity that is present is something to be happy about - and not just nationality but background, past employment, experience, knowledge, sector, interests... Wow!

So with the ice broken, the first week has involved lots and lots of conversing with as many people as possible on as many subjects as possible. Wonderful! Everyone is interesting. No one has been boring or arrogant or offensive in any way whatsoever! Quite amazing! And the conversations range from:

• Trenchant critiques of development - like the wonderful conversation with someone from Kenya about the loss of traditional cultural values that were more participatory and inclusive than any modern democratic state structures, which left us with the question of why there is so little mention of 'love' in the development discourse... My thoughts drifted toward Arturo Maturana... to
  

• Sharing of knowledge on development practice, within organisations, working at the field level - what's working, what isn't, where we're confused, where we're on the right track and where we aren't, drawing on our diverse experiences and backgrounds...

I must admit that I have been talking rather a lot.

Though I have only had one day actually focusing on my particular course, it seems like just what I wanted. We have started using participatory methods and reflecting on them, we have explored different modes or ways of learning (playing, gardening, reading, collaborating... and many more), we have divided into reflection groups, we have set up an inquiry to explore how gender may influence our learning processes, we have shared our life stories (visually and orally) and explained how this led us to IDS. We shared our hopes and fears and talked about them openly, offering each other support and expressing our common desire for solidarity within the group. The idea of forming an on-line learning group (e.g. through ning or perhaps through the ids intranet) that can be used while we are away to enable a continuous sharing of knowledge and experience has been floated and enthusiastically welcomed by the group. I am really quite excited by all of this!

As part of my course I will be maintaining a journal. This will involve actually writing with a pen so I am quite curious to see how this will compare and contrast with the writing that I do on this blog.

In the meanwhile, I am writing an essay today critiquing various definitions of development and will also be doing some further editing work for Seva Mandir's 6th Comprehensive Plan document. I also have plenty of reading to busy myself with. As the weeks roll on I will continue blogging my experiences here at IDS.

protecting the ethnosphere

The dilemma of what to do about 'uncontacted tribes' or, for that matter, indigenous peoples the world over has been a theme in some of my earlier blog posts. The real issue is the shattering of their worldviews and culture that 'development' almost inevitably brings. I ended my last post on the subject by saying that:

Perhaps, I should just stay well away and avoid even thinking about polluting them with my own confusion!

But this would suggest that there isn't even a role to play in helping them to exist... Though I still have no idea what to do, this wonderful video from the TED talks by Wade Davis (from National Geographic), warmed my heart and, despite the tragic undertones, left me with a small ray of hope:



The idea of there being an ethnosphere that is undervalued (I am trying to imagine, somewhat unsuccessfully, an ethnological economics, like environmental economics, that may offer us ways of protecting it) and, it would seem, whose destruction is considered to be an indication of development itself is really disturbing.

As Wade Davis says in this passage based on his time with aboriginees in northern australia:

...in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning.

This seems like the deepest recognition of everything being one that is conceivable: a life based on it rather than a life spent trying to grasp it. And how different a world this would produce.

So what do we do now?

Women, unity, gifts and spirituality: the foundation for women led community development in Delwara

In the small multi-caste town of Delwara, a women's group has been formed. This group is a platform for women to come together on a common platform across all kinds of traditional divides - caste, religion, class, etc. - to become agents of their own destiny. This morning, I spent a few hours with the group exploring some of the following questions:

• what is unity?
• how is unity created?
• how is unity destroyed?
• how is unity sustained?

Through these questions we covered a wide range of issues: the importance of knowing each other; what does it take to develop a meaningful relationship; making space in the heart for each other; listening with the heart to each others' stories; being there for each other; striving to understand each other; not letting divisive politics fragment the group (a responsibility of each individual); and the need to continuously nurture the group and retain courage in the face of all manner of challenges.

We also discussed the idea that each person present was bringing with them a gift. The group belongs to the women and it is nourished by the gifts that the women themselves bring. What are these gifts that the women bring? The ability to listen. A readiness to help those in need in whatever way possible. A spirit of cooperation and assistance. A desire to make a positive contribution in the world.

It struck me, as we engaged in this conversation, that we had reached a special level in the group. There was an emotional intensity, a sense of being part of something deep - perhaps even spiritual. The group was moving as a whole in a container that reverberated with the sense of collectivity that resonated from the women sitting there. This may only be my take on it though I do plan to check up on this feeling soon.

In some ways, I feel that I crossed a barrier, a boundary in the way that we usually dialogue. It is as though we made a shift from talking about mere practicalities or technicalities of rights, and government and frameworks and water tanks and pension schemes to tapping into the very soul of the women and its collective expression in their group. The words and emotions that were being exchanged were expressions of that individual and collective soul and, at the same time, the food that nourishes it. A deepening reminder of the fact that it is this level of conversation that connects the individual woman and her own soul to that of the group. In this sense it was both transcendental and palpable.

And what this really brings me to is something that I have felt for a long time but never really made a formal point of - and that is that this thing we call development really needs to be reframed as a spiritual process; a process of collective spiritual evolution. I do not feel that this is a dimension that finds adequate expression in the existing discourse around development - even in Seva Mandir. As we work on non-formal education centres, or village institutions, deal with targets and logical frameworks, worry about accountability and transparency, and so on... are we giving due attention to the fact that we are engaged in a process of spiritual evolution? Is there a space for this?

As an afternote: I really enjoyed working with Gulabji (who has replaced me as project coordinator in Delwara) today. He gave space where it was desired and support where it was required. He also was able to bring together spirituality across Hindu-Muslim divides in a seamless and natural manner and although we had not discussed our programme at any great length beforehand, it felt as though we were playing a familiar game. So my deep thanks and respect go out to this special soul!

community based organisations vs. organised communities

So, I've had this long-standing thought about working with communities... I have this notion that it's not particularly original but all the same it strikes me as worth noting down - especially as I'm in need the middle of preparing a proposal that builds on this idea.

Most of the development discourse - and I suppose I'm talking here about the mainstream stuff - seems to talk about what they call CBOs - Community Based Organisations. This term refers to just about any type of organisation that consist of people who live within a geographically bounded area. In general, big implementing agencies like to work with 'CBOs' because they contribute to the 'sustainability' of the intervention being implemented and project the image of being community-centred and participatory. OK.

However, there's something I don't like about the term 'CBO'. Is it to do with the way that it doesn't really do justice to the very notion of community? For that matter, what is a community? Isn't a community form of organisation in its own right? And if it is, are we really treating it like one? How can we re-frame these questions and ideas in a way that gives them more meaning and brings them more to life?

These kinds of questions led me to the idea of talking about 'organised communities' rather than 'community based organisations'. The question then becomes not one of how strong is the community based organisation but one of how strong is the community. This then leads us to confront what we are actually talking about when we talk about community. What is a community? What would we like our community to be like? What are the fears we have about the future of our community? What are the hopes we have for the future of our community?

Community itself seems so much more rich and meaningful a concept than CBO. CBO doesn't seem to carry any sense of neighbours caring about each other, of people being engaged in celebrations or festivals together: it seems well and truly void of culture. This, I believe is one of the great dangers of most development work: it tends to ignore the vast realm of culture. And I don't mean preserving traditional culture - I mean thinking about 'development' as a process of bringing about intentional, positive, cultural change through a process of dialogue combined with action.

Community is all about relationships. The work that we really ought to be doing is helping to make these relationships deep, fulfilling, meaningful, mutually empowering. Somehow, this sees far more important and pressing than the idea of setting up some kind of a semi-formal CBO with management capabilities.

The Perplexing Conundrum of 'Uncontacted Tribes' and Development

I recently came across a post via the Neuroanthropology blog over at the Culture Matters blog. This post mainly focuses on criticising the nonsense and stupidity that surrounds the way that the 'outside world' (i.e. us) relates to what end up getting called 'Uncontacted Tribes' (even though this is a myth). And I really appreciate the efforts that these anthropologists appear to be making to put things in their right perspective...

But then, as I lay in bed last night after reading the post, I found myself wondering... How on earth does whatever I am doing and what I want to do relate to all this? And how does that make me feel and do I still feel ok about myself? Or better, what ought I do about it? Wondering what the issue is?

I work in a field that is basically called 'development'. It is a hugely contested field, replete with its hardcore proponents, its alternative champions and its dissidents. Its primary (official) concern is with trying to make the world a better place. Now we all know (don't we?) that a lot of what gets done in the name of development is horrible and damaging - to the environment, to culture and generally to life on this planet. But like I said, development is a huge field and contains lots of alternative conceptions of what positive change really is. I like to think that I am working on one of the more (though by no means the most) alternative and benign types of development.

The organisation where I work has the basic objective of strengthening rural, predominantly tribal communities so that they can become self-governing entities. In the modern age, this means that the communities have to have the power to negotiate with the State (I hate giving it a capital 'S' but it seems necessary in a world where there is no escape from it). These tribals are entangled in the modern world through roads, motorcycles, party-politics, trade, employment, education, mobile phones, radios and so on. So they're nothing like the 'uncontacted tribes' from the Amazon.

They also have a life of increasing hardship. Being a part of the State means being a part of the political, economic and social structure that it entails. Sustainable 'hunter-gathering' has pretty much died out (and the forests that once supported it have by and large been destroyed). Indigenous medicines have either vanished or are vanishing. Population has mushroomed as people have shifted increasingly to settled agriculture. There is a scarcity of food available and child malnutrition - in terms of calories and micro-nutrients - is just ridiculously high. A host of other health problems prevail. At one level, this sorry state of affairs can be linked directly to what would once have been called development. And before it was called development it was probably called something along the lines of 'civilising the savages'. It disgusts me to think about it like that.

What am I trying to get at? First a little bit more beating around the bush. I am about to enroll on a degree - its a Masters in Participation, Power and Social Change. Sound exciting? Well, I think it is. Why do I want to take it? Besides my earlier post which explains the superficial reasons for going to study, this degree will hopefully give the time and space to explore - even more systematically that I already have done - just how society is held together and how people can be brought together in a process that enables them to live the life that they 'really' want rather than one that is sort of imposed on them from outside. What's my point?

The basic conundrum is this: where do these 'uncontacted tribals' fit into my schema of inclusive social change? Now before I get labeled as some kind of destroyer of indigenous culture and human diversity, I would like to make it very clear that I am fascinated by these tribes, the way they live, their belief systems, their healing systems, their socio-political structures. I don't feel that they need to be 'civilised' and I am perfectly happy with them living just the way they do. So, if I feel that way about it, why am I happy to go off and study on a course that is all about interfering with people, getting people connected up and engaged and making them capable of incfluencing the world in a way that is meaningful for them.

These 'uncontacted tribals' are not animals. So why are we keeping them in some kind of giant nature reserve and tracking them (a bit like we do with endangered species). Perhaps this is our way of preventing the destructive force of Development from completely obliterating them. In that case, perhaps we should keep on protecting them until we (the 'outside world') become sufficiently benign so as not to present a threat to them (is this even possible anymore? will we eradicate the common cold?). Or else does this preservation thing go on indefinitely until the collapse of modern civilisation (which seems like an increasingly likely possibility, as Dave Pollard is keen to profess in his wonderful blog - How to Save the World).

And what does all this mean for me and what I do? On the one hand, my new job description ought to be something along the lines of: 'salvaging Development's cultural wreckage'. My work is to try and help people whose lives are falling apart as a result of Development to organise themselves and recreate meaningful and sustainable community as a way of life so that they can be free from hunger, exploitation and the misery and hardship that this entails.

But the next step after salvaging is to enable people to no longer be the passive victims of the Development-Monster-On-A-Rampage but be empowered agents of their own destiny, creators of their own culture, cultivators and communicators of their own values, evolving collectively in some kind of sustainable wonder-land where people live in a perpetual state of harmony, ecstatic joy, meaning and fulfillment.

Not realistic? OK. But really, I find myself wondering what I will be able to learn from my degree in participation, power and social change about how I should relate to these 'Uncontacted Tribals'. Perhaps, I should just stay well away and avoid even thinking about polluting them with my own confusion!

What do you think about all this?

Wisdom in the Rickshaw

While I was on my way to visit a friend in Delhi after a conference on Citizenship and Governance (organised by PRIA), I found myself on a rather long rickshaw ride. I decided to start up some casual banter with the driver, an old man from a village in Uttar Pradesh. After some small talk about whether there had been any change in Delhi recently, and whether the lot of the poor was getting any better, the conversation turned to the much loved subject of politics.

The old rickshaw driver took this subject seriously and displayed what I believe is a deep and rich understanding of what democracy is really about… his verdict: we are not living in a democracy! What we have now is politician-power, not people-power! Real democracy, he said, is about people sitting together, discussing things, making compromises and trying to ensure that everyone gains from an outcome. It is, essentially, a communicative process - or perhaps more than this - a community building process. What we have today is so far away from this that there is little surprise we are careering down a rather destructive path with things falling a part and everyone becoming obsessively self-interested, self-serving and just plain selfish!

The simple process of not being connected in any meaningful way to the plethora of decisions that really affect our lives seems like a perfect recipe for alienation. This alienation is supported - or made bearable - through an obsessive focus on things like wealth, status and mostly meaningless entertainment. The philosophical foundations of our culture - and economic, social and political systems that these foundations support - are all tuned perfectly to encourage this great lack of connectivity between people and the decisions the decision that they take every day. And the bizarre thing - in my mind - is that a very significant proportion of people living in this kind of a world actually claim to like living in such a system. They like not having to worry about who their neighbours are; they like not being called to meetings to discuss local development issues; they like talking about the new things they have bought, the new job that they have got, the payrise they secured, etc. And so we go along filling our lives with all sorts of things yet never really being in control of much because we have transferred our own autonomy to a system that we feel it is quite reasonable to be a part of… and gradually things fall apart.

My conclusion, I suppose is that the vast majority of the world has been or is being hypnotised by the lure of acquisition and status in such a way that it forgets the value of the simplicity and connectivity that it once had. This connectivity, this local democracy, I imagine, may have been the gateway to a sustainable way of life and a sense of belonging in the cosmos. I like to hope that we are just drifting through a transitory phase in the history of humanity… or does our future involve an endless experience of alienation?

Funny where you'll find wisdom really.

acculturising with the choklas

Some time ago, last month, I was asked by Swati from Seva Mandir, to help out with some planning for a workshop with a group of representatives from several tribal (Bhil) jati panchayats (also known as choklas) from Gogunda, through Chali, all the way up to Godhaghati (stretching out north of Udaipur)... these people are the traditional leaders of their communities and have the responsibility for overseeing all manner of decisions related to social functions - marriages, deaths, births, customs, norms and various other kinds of family, tribe and other disputes and matters. the basic idea behind the workshop, as I understood it, was that there was a prevailing sense that these groups had some stake in various unfair practices against women - and that this needed to be explored so that changes could be made to help improve the position of women.

The workshop preparation a real last minute kind of a thing and although I was quite enthusiastic, I realised that I really didn't know a great deal about who these people were... So I talked to Swati and tried to get a sense of the purpose: is the focus on trying to get the jati panchayat people to change their practices or is it do find out what is happening and what they think about it (i.e. knowing where they stand)? Obviously, as usual, the answer was that both of these points were important. I brainstormed some workshop plans, doodled up a little, shared them with Swati and some other staff, modified it all and got ready to get rolling. The basic idea was that we would divide into manageable groups and focus on a series of issues:
re-marriages or nata pratha;bride price or dapa pratha (like dowry but the woman's family receives the money); women's exclusion from the jajam (the community's carpet upon which official decisions are taken); various customs in which women have to bear a heavy financial burden;Real stories would be invited from the various jati panchayat leaders related to each of the issues. Sitting in a circle, these would then be with a particular focus on how they impacted women and children, what the role of the Jati Panchayat was in this process and what could be done about it.

I don't want to get right into the depths of all the impacts and stories but, instead, I would like to share some of the most striking features of my discussion that day with the jati panchayat people:

• The Jati Panchayat representatives consider themselves as people who are are responsible for doing seva (service) in their communities - which is not the way that they usually get presented in the 'development' discourse. Their notion of seva seems worthy of further exploration and investigation - no doubt that it would yield something rich.

• Trying to get people to tell stories in which they make themselves complicit came across as being a rather counterproductive or non-sensical strategy.Following a discussion process based on this created less of an opportunity for building trust, mutual understanding and a better sense of how we could work together than deciding to let the discussion flow in a more open way and probing areas that were of personal interest to me and gave the Jati Panchayat people a chance to talk about their own concerns and how they feel, etc.

• The Jati Panchayat people, essentially, feel that much of the change ('development') that is taking place is leading to a breakdown in their social structure, their community values and their hold on the community. This has a direct effect on their sense of identity and, my sense, is that it leaves them feeling threatened, defensive and marginalised. Not surprising then that they appear resistant to change! Any change to their culture simply seems like a threat to their identity. Given the overwhelmingly negative nature of change (from their perspective), it is not surprising that they demonstrate reactions around the idea of changing women's roles in their communities... Starting with their own concerns about what is going on (though not being such an obvious way of addressing our agenda) might end up being an even more effective means of getting to the same, ultimate outcomes.

• Some points raised by some participants in the context of education really bring home their concerns. The leaders were blaming a lack of shiksha (education) on the high rates of young men who run off (apparently quite frivolously) with second wives leaving the first one (often with a child) in a bit of a mess. I questioned this, wondering how the increase in school coverage could correlate with a lack of shiksha. The answer was thus: (1) not all shiksha in the school - both family and community are important places where shiksha happens; and (2) the shiksha provided in the schools encourages selfishness rather than a sense of community or collective responsibility. Wow! And to think that we tried to argue that these people don't know what quality education means!?!? It seems to me that we never really tried to understand their point of view. If we had, we might have made much faster progress over the last 40 years.

Ultimately, the experience left me with a feeling that these JPP could (or should) be one of Seva Mandir's most valuable partners if we could only learn to understand them and work with them! It also left me feeling that I would really like to get a proper chance to engage with them in more depth in the future.