Village One, Village Two
“I went to a village that is well off the national grid, which has a “renewable energy power station ” – a wind turbine… This sense of confidence and security, and therefore, ambition, seems to me the biggest impact of having electricity. Exuding a new pride in the village, people talked about a “revival of the town”, – how young people who had left for the capital were coming back, people from surrounding areas were coming in buying land and building houses… They said, “before we only had two TVs, now we have 31; we are smarter, we are more cultivated, we know what’s happening around the world”.”
Umred was just another small town in the middle of nowhere, dusty and underwhelming. But Umred had begun to dream, townspeople told me, because of television, because of cousins with tales of call-center jobs and freedom in the city. Once Umred contracted ambition, blackouts became intolerable… In Misal’s world, television was seen, even by parents, as a force of liberation. “TV is the very hi-fi form of everything,” Misal said. “It’s the extreme level of ideas, where they show you everything at top level, so that certainly gives you motivation. On TV you see the things of world-class standard. When you see some person on Discovery catching anaconda, you are looking at the best person in the world for catching anaconda. On TV we never see the strugglers or something like that; we see the people who have achieved what they wanted to be.”
January 19, 2011