Article ID: IG.16.11:2021

Characters of the story: Mr. Sharma (myself-Gaurav Sharma), Grandma (my grandmother-Nirmala Devi)

Context of the story: Transformative experience by involving myself into grassroots innovations.

I am talking about the innovative minds you meet in your day-to-day life. These beings are distributed everywhere in the society. And I am sure that you have met these innovators “who works so hard every time to fulfill their general needs for a balanced life”. But often we wear the crown of ignorance and forget to learn about life from their valuable lifestyle.

It was a spring season. One sunny day, Mr. Sharma, a self-propelled boy packed his stuff for a visit to his village, which is located in the high hills of Himachal Pradesh. He was excited to meet his grandmother with whom he happened to spend all time discussing about the needs of village in terms of amendments. But this time, he wanted to do something different. As he reminisced a childhood memory about the kind of art-activities he used to do with his grandma. The activities were associated with the grassroot innovations which used to fulfill the basic needs of village’s populace. The flashbacks of that activity-full-of-creativity intrigued him so much that he wanted to live that moment again. While gossiping about the life, he asked grandma to show her work which she did in the past few months. The amount was not substantial as he expected to be. Reason being, this time, grandma’s hands were not enough strong to perform that grassroots creative work of crafting and designing the housing assets. He felt that, so asked her to teach him that skill a bit again, due to lack of delicate skills which were needed in this work.

Once again, the making of traditional assets for housing was started. This time it was officially documented by that boy, as he wanted to showcase that in front of his professional world (see *Gallery section in the end). The traditional assets they created was made-up of bamboo leaves/sticks or date palm leaves. Usually, she used to make traditional seating, some useful containers, and rain covers by using that half dried (not papery but with less moisture) leaves. He followed her purveyed instructions gradually and got successful in making of the same. He was happy, and this time he also realized the essence of less convenience. “The less resources we have, more creative thought process we carry”. This is not something new he realized; He had realized these things intellectually while addressing the problem statements in research. But this case of realization was full of intense involvement and experience to seek something with a lesser convenience and feasibility. No convenience of any other accessory, work with the leaves/ bamboo sticks and only work with the leaves/sticks, nothing else. Therefore, as a volition driven boy, this became a transformative experience for him and insightful as well, that how people had figured out these remarkable subtle patterns of arranging leaves to create something valuable for their basic lifestyle? The answer was clear, you need to appreciate the value of components you have in your life. When you try to consider yourself in the life, you try to perform some adjustments which gives some amount of solace to you. But when you consider yourself as a life, then you are only passionate about living at your fullest potential. That’s what these grassroot innovators have done. They have nothing to do with our business of so called “successful lifestyle”. In awareness or unawareness, they are seeking something in their basic lifestyle by breaking the walls of limitations. And the interesting thing is that they never consider any limitations to their abilities. It is just that they never got the opportunities to showcase their potential.

With such context of realization, he decided to document these grassroots practices in a very delicate way. Most of the time (or I must say every time), the credits are not given to these innovators by the scientific community while garnering any traditional information or idea or a technique from them. Another issue raised in the conversation, was lack of these traditional skills in the current generation of village. No one in the village wanted to continue this work even as a hobby.

As a researcher, he felt very bad and showed a hope to his grandma that he is going to do something for it. She was not having any anticipation with respect to the words he exuded. So, she smiled and then laughed- “what are you going to do?”, she asked. With a humble eye-contact-and-smile- “You must see”, he said; …

…To be continued in the next article “Stillness in the chaos“.

Hello readers, here, I am ending this part of my real journey. The upcoming part of this interpreted journey is very interesting. Stay tuned with me!!! And don’t forget to check the gallery of documented traditional assets (as earlier mentioned in the article).

Thank you!!!