“Look, there’s Theresa May, dancing at a Tory party conference. This is deeply embarrassing,” said my British friend C, as we made our way around the hills of Uttarakhand, in and around Mukhteshwar.
We YouTubed it.
The clip begins with the ABBA song ‘Dancing Queen’ playing in the background.
Of ‘Maybots’, Trumps & Kavanaughs
Adoring MPs from the conservative Tory party clap and stand up, as the British Prime Minister with a tight face and tighter blue jacket enters stage right, swaying to the song. The blue background had the word “Opportunity” printed large. My friend snorted and said May was doing this jig because there was a joke going around Great Britain that the PM works on auto-pilot and takes no decisions.
“May Bot” is the moniker she had to shake off by turning into a dancing queen. “Ooo-oooh see that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queeeeeeen…Friday night and the lights are low”
Five and a half thousand kilometres away, at the UN headquarters in New York, the US President delivered another fantastic YouTube moment. He tried to defend the person he nominated to the Supreme Court – Brett Kavanaugh, currently being investigated by the FBI on charges of sexual assault. In the preamble of his defence, Trump rolled out in a classic Trump drawl, “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”
His listeners – delegates of the UN – laughed, as if this wasn’t the UN but a sitcom, and Trump was the ace deliverer of laughable lines.
And then Trump tried to bend fact into funny fiction by claiming that he intended this to be a laugh-out-loud moment all along.
An Aesthetic Crossover Fit for Halloween
Back home, our own MPs and election-hopefuls are rolling out the entertainment like that is what they are being paid for. At last count, the RSS claimed it loves Muslims at a press conference in Delhi and Congress Party President Rahul Gandhi said he is a Ram bhakt. The saffronites are putting on a liberal attire and the faux liberals are wearing Hindu orange. And the crossed aesthetics are giving us all a fright.
When the real world is this ludicrous, the only thing to do, thought C and I, is to escape. The hills are therapeutic in such times.
But as we discovered, they are also the perfect setting to renew our faith in dissidence, in all things ‘urban naxal’, to imagine a world that is a little less ridiculous, one day and task at a time.
I will explain.
The hills of Uttarakhand are full of people who are questioning why our world is the way it is and how it can be different.
Let’s start with N and her husband who moved here eight years ago. With one question on their minds – why do they have to consume so much in order to be? Is there a way out, a way to reduce the consumption and the politics it spawns? They think there is. Tucked away behind a jungle of oak and pine trees is their mud house. A large and ridiculous witch sways on her broomstick in the window in their drawing room. She is a mobile sculpture from Prague.
Nothing Simple About Village Life
N is a traveller with many lives, many wicked plots on broomsticks. The best of them is her getaway from a life of over-consumption and she draws you into that conversation in every choice she has made. The kind of house she has built. The choice to earn frugally and spend time volunteering with an organisation called Waste Warriors that is cleaning up the piles of garbage in the hills, one village at a time.
N is exercising the choice to say that if she doesn’t want her politics to be dictated by Trump and Modi and the market forces that have created them, then she needs to consume less, choose a decentralised life.
And that’s where the cliché ends. It isn’t a simple village life.
Living in the hills is hard work. She and her husband cook and clean. They don’t buy a new phone every year; they get their old ones repaired. They put up with long hours of no electricity and an unpredictable water supply. But they are happy. And it was palpable.
The ‘infection’ spread and left C and I wondering about the tension between the city and the villages in the hills. Are the clever people who have moved away adding to the ruination of the hills? Not N and her husband, we said. It all depends on the choices you make – the politics you make or unmake in the market you choose to be in or disrupt a little.
But the hills didn’t bend our minds only in the conversations we had with people like us. It was equally in the choices we saw the people who had always lived in those villages make and the migrants that came in seasonally.
Far from the Madding Crowd
A migrant family from Chittorgarh in Rajasthan reminded us about the two-way conversation that has always happened between hills and plains, rural and urban, migrants and settlers. This was a family of lohars – metal workers. They set out from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh at the start of the year, where they make sickles for people to cut wheat with. The next season they shift to Haldwani in Uttarakhand and then to villages around Mukhteshwar.
It’s barely subsistence money, but the dirt and plastic and ugliness of the city aesthetic and its politics wasn’t lost on them.
“My in-laws are from Delhi. From the Azadpur mandi area,” the woman with six kids said, as she sharpened her lathe. They were removing rust from a clutch of sickles for 20 rupees each. “We like the metro, but we don’t ever want to live in that city. We prefer the hills,” she said, and her children echoed her sentiment.
Her husband stood smiling, his shirt open and his and her names tattooed on his chest. “It’s a custom we have when we marry; we tattoo each other’s names on our bodies,” he explained and showed us his name on his wife’s wrist. She smiled.
Do You Really Need a Skyline of Plastic?
C asked me to tell her he thought her Rajasthani jhumkas were beautiful. The woman smiled and flirted right back with C. “We have such exquisite jewellery in Rajasthan. The kamarband, the tikka, the chokker, the anklets, the bangles. If I wore all of it, no one would be able to work. They’d just stop and stare at me,” she said laughing – owning her rural-ness and subversiveness.
This is why it’s vital to walk around the hills. To lose yourself, your ego, your city-centred sense of everything revolving around you.
When your ego is diminished and bent out of shape by the hills, you can ask yourself what precisely it is that you do in the city and whether it adds to the skyline of plastic and pollution and sitcom politics.
And how it might be possible to put a few oak trees in people’s way and ask them if they need that big fancy car. Or the new phone.And if some ridiculous mad laughter from on top of a hillside is more interesting consumption than Theresa May doing an ABBA for her party colleagues.
(Revati Laul is a Delhi-based journalist and film-maker, and the author of ‘The Anatomy of Hate’, forthcoming from Context /Westland in November 2018. She tweets at@RevatiLaul. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own.The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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