One of my favourite movies is Swades. I can watch it million times and still not get bored with it. Though there are some reviews which talk of it being like a documentary, it is precisely this slow pace and the depiction of the village life that attract me to this movie. I specially love the song "Saawariya" for the scenes where the rural Indian life is shown - the part that always made me want to spend long time in the "real" rural part of India.
We have a house in a village in Kerala. We used to go to this house when we were small children. My parents belong to a huge family with close ties and we were the nuclear family living in cities and towns visiting our great-grandmothers in the village during the holidays. We looked forward to these visits. Every visit meant a confluence of all cousins around the sametime - it was also the time when the families working for my great-grandmothers in the house used to make different special dishes (which I have not seen since - like Madakkusaan). They used to make huge biscuit tins full of sweets , bananachips, murukku, mango pickles and so on. These used to be kept in dark rooms around the kitchens.
All the families around there had children of our age. These children used to get together in one wing at the south end of the house - not used much nowadays. There was a small stage on top of which we used to pray all together in the evenings. In the mornings, these used to be summer school for all the children around. We used to join these classes to learn numbers, mathematics and malayalam. We had slates on which we wrote with a slate pencil (chalk was a luxury) and we used to wipe the slates clean with a weed which we picked before the classes.
When we were not in these classes, we used to run around the place fishing in one of the three ponds, climbing the haystacks, going to the fields and sometimes escaping the eyes of the elders and running to the houses of one of the families working in the house. They used to be small houses like the ones in Swades and dark inside. They invited us inside and treated us to some eatables, gave us a chair to sit. The families lived on of one the plots next to the house and all their families, had small houses around the house. All these relatives used to come to see these city bred aliens and to talk to us. We were absolutely thrilled to have the attention and always looking for small children we could run around with.
In the evenings, we used to go to the family temple about a kilometer walk away. We crossed fields and reached the temple. There were distant relatives living there and all wanted to talk to us and invited us into their homes. We had some festivals in this temple - each one had a special feeling and a colourful unique atmosphere to it. As you might watch in the movie Manichithrathaazhu ( remade in Hindi as Bhool Bhulayya), ghost figures locked into rooms closed by chants filled locks were normal life - the family temple also had shrines which were locked not to be opened. We had rituals in the temples which were to make sure that the spirits were at rest. We had small vans, autorickshaws which used to announce movies that were running in the nearby town. The fairs and the festivities from the temples which visited the different houses with elephants and the dieties.
Many images in Swades remind me of these trips to the house which now waits for the family to come back and claim it (though I have not been to a panchayat and many other things). When we go there now, the house stands forelorn, the families which took care of us have lost some of the last people who took care of us when we were young (Leelamma who passed away when I was at IMD was one of them). Their next generation had to search for other jobs as the family scattered and as my grandfather was the only one who remained and subsequently his illness made him leave for the city as well. Now when we go there we go for an evening, visit the temple, look at the house, hope to come back and renovate it and live back there. It is a dream - a dream combined with the dreams I saw falling apart when I left India - of taking vacations to travel around rural India visiting villages, visiting festivals in the villages celebrated as they should be celebrated.
A different version of the dream lives now - we visit rural Europe - as in Kerala (in comparison to other parts in India), the difference between a town and village is quite blur. One day, I would like to live my real dream - I know I do not need to shift back to India - I just need to spend my vacations at the right place.