Zaadazadati
By Vishwas Patil
A poignant narrative of a community displaced by the dam project. The mountain village of Jambhli and a couple of neighbouring villages are going to be submerged under the waters of the dam that is proposed on the river valley. The people of Jambhli village in the mountains seem to have no respite after they lose their village to the upcoming dam project. The project, that had been stalled for many years by the villagers protest led by the local school-teacher leader, has been now revived by the councillor of the district as he has a selfish stake in it. He needs the waters of the dam for the sugarcane fields to supply raw material for the sugar factory that he wants to set up for his only son. Add to it,the government in a bid to live up to Pandit Nehru's claim of dams being the temples of modern India, is in a hurry to complete the project to show off their accomplishment. They are convinced to agree to rehabilitation and give up their lands only to realize that all the promises and assurances given to them by the local leaders are predictably hollow. The local leader with a loyal following tries his best to avail the benefits which are rightfully theirs under the terms and conditions of rehabilitation - but in a so called democratic and free India- who really are the law keepers? In the tussle between the deserving and the greedy, the honest and the crooks, the gentle and the brutal - who wins? Whom do the mountain gods favour? The story takes us through the everyday lives of these families - their farms and fields, their kitchens, weddings, births, naming ceremonies and funerals. What is it that make people matter? Money? Power? Greed? Who and how do we decide which person's life is more important than the other? What makes one person give up while another take on the cause as a leader? How does one person decide to fight only for his/her family and another to fight for the whole village even at the cost of his family? This books forces one to take a hard look at what we define as development not from the nature's perspective as we usually tend to do in modern times but from a very human or rather humane perspective. It took me more time than usual to read this book in its original Marathi edition but it was definitely worth it.
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