Perhaps in one sense the road, ironically, might save it, by stopping the younger generation deserting it entirely when their parents and grandparents are no longer. But in spite of all this, the one thing that struck me most about the people of Tashigong was how happy they seemed. No one was hurrying around, shoulders tensed, faces frowning with worry. Instead their eyes were creased with laughter lines and bright with mirth. They laughed easily and often. There was a lightness of spirit, a deep-seated cheerfulness. People had time for each other, stopped and said hello and shot the breeze. It wasn’t just in Tashigong, either; it was my abiding impression of all the remote tribal villages I visited in Arunachal Pradesh.
I’d felt it among the Idu too – their cheerfulness, the affection between people, the sense of community and mutual help. People were round-cheeked and well-fed, their gardens overflowing with fruit and vegetables. They might not have owned cars and televisions, those modern barometers of wealth, but it would be wrong to say they lived in poverty. Despite the hardships, I felt life here to be the antithesis of our fast-paced, mechanised, materialistic, Western existences – a life that’s become so driven by artificial wants. Life in Tashigong was real.
It was about food, shelter, family, community, togetherness. It was about need, not greed. It was about living with nature, the seasons and the cycle of night and day. People produced their own naturally organic food, breathed pure mountain air, spent the majority of their time outside and were free from the tyranny of the sedentary, screen-addicted lifestyles so many of us now lead. British children, aged between five and sixteen spend an average of six and a half hours a day in front of a screen, a figure that’s doubled in twenty years. The average American adult spends ninety-three percent of their lives in cars or buildings, while the average American child plays outdoors for only half an hour each week.
But here no one spent their days sitting in cars and air-conditioned offices, working in pointless jobs to pay the mortgage and buy more stuff they didn’t need. They weren’t subjected to the same drip-feed of distressing news that filters through our media every day. They lived in multi-generational households, looked after their elders, brought up their children together. Theirs was an existence of genuine togetherness, not one lived through distorting, distancing filters of emails and social media. Being there for those few precious days swelled in me a sense of loss, of want, of nostalgia. Maybe I’m guilty of putting the villagers’lives on a pedestal of lost pastoralism, but I saw Tashigong as a paradigm of a disappearing way of life.
(Concluded)
