'Ram Ram' India!
Bajju, Rajasthan. 9 pm In Bajju, every morning I wake up for chai and smile at strangers, who break their 'Being strangers' tag with that beautiful smile. In a similar way, there is a 'Good-morning' which breaks the unwanted ice, in the rural area across India . People living in Indian cities don't know this concept of wishing strangers, early morning. Coming from an urban Indian background, I also thought that this is a very western concept. I realised its importance when I spent days travelling with my foreigner friends. It would just be a smile, an acknowledgement to a complete stranger. But my recent shift to rural India made me realise that it is much more common here to smile here than anywhere else. When we look at the bigger picture, we always think that the villages have things to learn from the cities, but now when I look at the micro-level, I realise that the villages are any day more 'advanced' than the so-called 'modern' cities.