City Kid Chronicles: From East Village to, uh, Actual Village

For the past few years, Sam, Srilekha, and I have all been living in New York, a place where the word “village” refers to a kind of cultural hamlet, a neighborhood with a certain self-conscious style and character. The West Village has its French bistros and handbag boutiques and narrow ivy-wrapped brick apartments, the East Village has its laced-up leather and its vegan organic noodle joints.

In the West Village, you can go to your local greenmarket to buy milk that comes in a glass bottle printed with the name of an upstate farm in antique lettering. In the village of Vikravandi, Tamil Nadu, you can walk out of the kitchen to the organic farm in the backyard and milk a cow that you thought was male until you found yourself tugging at its udders. You can take tamarind from the tamarind tree and eggplant from the eggplant bush and dal from the lentil vine and make dosas and sambhar for dinner, under the discriminating eye of Velangani, the masterchef auntie who cooks in the kitchen. You’ve got a Discovery Channel on your front verandah, where you can watch the entire cycle of life and death in insect form (it appears to be bug-breeding season these days in Vikravandi). There’s a red-mouthed guinea hen who wanders in and out of the house and attacks if you reach for the eggs in its nest. People walk and work barefoot.

In the daytime, men in lunghis bike down the road balancing unlikely quantities of iron wire on the tops of their heads. At night, when the candles burn down, men and women carry cots from their palm-thatched concrete houses and relocate outside to sleep where it’s cooler. When you meet somebody new, they’ll ask you, “What’s your name?” and “What do you do?” and then, invariably, “Have you eaten?”

And by "milking," I mean watching a pro do most of it in 10 minutes and then awkwardly struggling with the cow on my own for another 10 minutes.

Dosa-making with Velangani.

I saw a lifestyle, a pace, a set of everyday rituals that I’ve never seen before. So I was excited to make videos with our students, because the topics of their videos were things I was curious to know: What’s your village like? Your school? Daily routine?

Here are two of the videos they came up with:

1) Our Home

Interview poker-faces.

Meet the students of St. Peter Paul Home for Disabled Children, a government-aided residential school in Mugaiyur, Tamil Nadu. In this video, they tour us around their school and speak about the difficulties they’ve faced as handicapped students in rural Tamil Nadu, their experiences finding a community at St. Peter Paul, and their ambitions for the future. Plus, they’ll show you their singing and dancing chops (which, frankly, put mine to shame. When they asked me to show them my dance moves, I changed the subject.)

Link to video here: http://vimeo.com/30616854

2) One Day in My Life

4th-grade hooligans.

They may appear pint-sized, but the 4th- and 5th-class kids of St. Antony’s Primary School are very busy people–and are capable of offering PBS-documentary-worthy reenactments of a day in the life of a primary school hooligan.

Link to video here: http://vimeo.com/30557432