My Village Story in Farmer's words

How do u sell your produce at a price you want?

As soon as we get the harvest, the brokers swarm around us. Each of them wants a major share of the produce. But they want to pay us less. They try to fix a price. We generally don't like that price. We do our calculations and we can not come down to a price which is less than the (invested+investment needed). We bargain and get closer to what we want. We sell it off. Some of us keep a portion of produce which will be sold after another season. The older rice fetches more price. Rich farmers do use facilities of Warehouses because they can afford it.

Why do not you go to the market yard?

We can sell only at government fixed rates in the market yards. The quality of rice produced does not matter in the pricing. Over that, we need to take the produce to the market yard and wait till it is sold. We also need to pay bills on each bag sold. Why go to the market yard when we can make a deal with the broker. After hard work on the farm, we do not have the energy to transport and sell our produce.

Don't brokers trouble you?

Why will not they trouble us? They take our produce first. Then they pay us after making us wait. And you know that we prepare for our next crop. We need money for seeds and pesticides. So we take a loan from money lender. The interest rate is around 18% to 40%. After fighting for a better price, we lose the money in the form of interest. It is a double loss for us. This is the big problem with brokers.

I buy from you. Why don't you sell it to the other customers?

You buy because it is from your farm and you know us. Why will some other guy take the pain of coming to our village and buy? There is no platform for us to sell. Most of the customers buy retail rather than wholesale.

If you have a better platform, a better price, will you sell it?

Why not! You are educated. You should help us. These days many things are sold online. Can we do that?

Ended there!

The success of 10000 views in my blog!

                   My blog 'Tomorrow is just another day'  has crossed 10k views. Though it may not have 10k unique readers but I am sure that a pretty good number of people from across the globe are following my blog. 

                    Initially, I never shared my articles on any other social media platform. The reason was I had the fear of rejection. Later, I changed my mind. We see so much trash material going viral - all misconstrued data. Why not, I can share my thoughts too right!

                Once I started sharing, people shared some good thoughts and encouraged me to write more. Some people personal reached out to me and provided their suggestions. I thank every one of them. 

            I thank my friends from Poland, Russia,  Ukraine and Turkey for being among the large portion of readers. I will keep writing and will put each step towards realizing the dream of writing a book on Rayalaseema. 

Seeing Faces

"You see the same face every day but you may never know the name of the face"  said one anonymous guy!

I was riding my motorbike at 9 AM on the road to my school today. I saw a couple of faces and remember them distinctly from my bicycle rides 10 years ago. 10 years was a long time. And 10 years ago, I was studying my tenth standard.

One of those faces was that of Rickshaw puller. Neither I asked his name nor did I talk to him! Because I never did. He was pulling the same rickshaw though it was down and dusted but engaged him. He did all kind of menial jobs - pulling the stones to furniture - everything! He did the job with the same kind of passion. There was no dearth of it. Suddenly, he looked at me. I hoped he recognized me. Alas! No. I questioned myself - why did he not smile at least? I was over beaming my smile to let him know that I recognized him but he did not.

The other face was that of a Shopkeeper. I, along with my friends, used to come to taste mouth watering Mirchi Bajjis and Mysore Bajjis! Even the thought of it is savoring! I stopped by and asked her to serve me a plate of each! As soon as I got the food in my hands I became indulgent!! Suddenly someone yelled my name as if he was going to hit me. That's part of our culture! It was my friend and we talked at length. We talked about how we used to come over here and fight over the payment. But the sad part was that the shopkeeper did not recognize us.

This threw me back. How can someone forget their favorite customers? How can they forget our faces who constantly traveled on the same route as theirs? Then it stuck me that I was not part of their lives and they were. One classic example was that I remember the rest room supervisor in the Qatar airways lounge at the airport. When I say hello to him, he never responded back with the same emotion. I remember because of my frequent Flys through the same route. But for him,  there are many other frequent flyers. He is part of my life and my observation but I am not his because for him it does not matter. Then why should it matter for me?

I can still avoid recognizing people but I can not. Some people remember everything and some people forget names of the people they frequently work with. It happens but again the warm hello to an unknown stranger is always a good habit. 

"What set us apart from other animals is we got a brain which sees, hears, thinks, feels, remembers, dances.... What not!"