It was around three or four in the afternoon. The light was slowly fading, and the dust on the village paths had begun to turn golden. I was in Jharkhand, working with Kalamandir, an NGO that was trying to build livelihoods in the villages around Janumdi.
We were working with the local communities on grass mat weaving. Chandan, a master weaver, was leading the craft activities. With very little money and a lot of effort, we had managed to set up a small shop. Some outside support was also beginning to come in. Under Amitava Ghosh’s leadership, things were slowly taking shape. What had started as a small effort was beginning to look like something meaningful.
Those days, we were full of energy. We travelled from one village to another, looking for opportunities, trying new things and finding ways to improve what people were already doing. We were always thinking about what could be done next.
One afternoon, there was a weekly mela in the village. I always enjoyed visiting these markets. There was so much to see and experience. The smell of local food, people selling vegetables, bamboo baskets, small household things and all kinds of handmade objects. It was a place where the everyday life of the community came together.
A young boy from the village had promised to accompany me to the mela.
On my way to meet him, I passed a place where I had seen him working that morning. He was making a small wooden stool. He had already cut all the pieces. The legs, the seat and the crossbars were lying around him. Everything seemed ready to be put together.
I looked at the work and thought it was a simple job. He should be able to finish it in an hour or two.
But when I passed the same place in the afternoon, he was still working on it. He was sitting on the ground, carefully cutting a piece of wood. I could not understand why it was taking him so long.
I sat beside him for a while and watched. Then I started suggesting an easier way.
“Why are you working so hard on this? Just get a nail. Hammer it in and you will finish it in no time.”
I said it more than once. I genuinely thought I was helping him. I had somewhere to go, and he was spending the whole day making a simple stool.
He listened patiently but did not agree. He wanted to do it his way.
After some time, an older man, possibly his father or uncle, came out and spoke to him. I could not understand the language, but the tone was quite sharp. It sounded like he was correcting the boy for something. The boy immediately stopped what he was doing. He quietly told me that he would finish it the next day.
We then went to the mela together. Within a few minutes, he was laughing and enjoying himself. But something about that conversation stayed with me. I kept wondering what the old man had said to him.
I asked a few people, but nobody could explain it properly.
I was visiting that village cluster for about a week every month. This incident had happened during my third month there. I continued travelling back and forth, and almost eight months passed during my engagement with the community.
The answer came much later, at a village festival.
The whole village had gathered. People were sharing food, drinking rice beer and dancing together. The same step was repeated again and again. I joined them, trying to follow their rhythm, though I was nowhere close to getting it right.
At the edge of the gathering, I noticed the same older man. He came towards me and asked whether I had eaten dinner. He was quite warm and friendly.
I thought this was the right time to ask him about that afternoon.
I found Chandan, who knew a little Bengali, and requested him to help me communicate. I asked the old man what he had told the boy that day.
He smiled before answering.
What he explained changed the way I looked at many things.
He said that in their way of living, they were careful about what they took from nature. They preferred to use materials that could return to the earth within their own lifetime. If they wanted to build a wall, they used mud. If they wanted to make a stool, they used wood and joined the pieces using traditional wooden joints.
They knew how to work with metal. There were people in their community who understood the process of extracting and working with it. But they did not use it casually. Metal was a limited resource. Once taken from the earth, it could not simply be replaced. They believed it was wrong to use something so precious just to save a little time.
That was what the old man had been telling the boy. He was not scolding him for taking too long. He was reminding him not to take an easy way out when it meant using something that was not necessary.
The nail I had suggested was not just a nail to him. It was a resource that had to be respected.
I began thinking about that afternoon differently.
I had seen a boy taking an entire day to make a stool. The old man had seen a boy learning how to use resources carefully. I was worried about how long the work was taking. They were thinking about what they were using and why.
There was another thing I had completely missed.
The boy was not simply making a stool. He was learning to understand wood. He was finding out how the material behaved, where it could be cut, how the pieces could fit into each other and how much pressure he could apply without damaging it.
He was learning through his hands.
Every cut was teaching him something. Every mistake was part of the learning. He was developing a relationship with the material, the tools and the knowledge passed down through generations.
The stool was only the final outcome. Something much more important was happening in the process.
He was becoming a person who knew how to work with wood.
And I had failed to see all of this.
My education and professional experience had trained me to look at things differently. I was always looking at the outcome. How much time would it take? Could we make it faster? Could we improve the process? Could we produce more?
I had begun to measure work by the time taken to complete it and the number of things produced.
Looking back, I realise that I was carrying the same thinking into the villages where I was supposed to be learning from people.
We often go to rural communities believing that we have something to teach them. We arrive with our degrees, our experience, our funding and our ideas about development. We look at the way people work and immediately start thinking about how to make things faster, easier and more productive.
We rarely stop to ask what knowledge already exists there, why people do things in a particular way, or what we might lose by changing their practices.
Over the years, we have become very good at taking from nature. We have built systems that encourage us to use more, produce more and consume more. We hardly think about where the materials come from, how much energy goes into making things or what happens after we are done using them.
In the name of development, we have taken so much from the earth that we have started treating its resources as if they are unlimited.
And here was a community that had no need to explain sustainability through presentations, books or workshops. They were practising it in their everyday lives.
They knew what they needed and what they did not. They understood that just because something was available did not mean it had to be used. They were not refusing metal because they did not know how to use it. They were choosing not to use it because they understood its value.
That distinction stayed with me.
I often think about how we use the word education. We assume that people who have gone through formal education know more and those who have not are somehow less informed. But that day made me question this assumption.
What I saw was a different kind of education. An education that was not written in books or taught in classrooms. It was part of everyday life, passed from one generation to another through observation, practice and conversations.
The old man was not giving the boy a lecture on conservation. He was simply teaching him how to live.
That experience changed the way I look at making things, working with materials and, more importantly, working with communities.
Today, whenever I see someone taking time to do something by hand, I try not to judge the work by how quickly it gets completed. I try to understand what is happening in that process. What is the person learning? What decisions are being made? What knowledge is being used? What relationship is being built between the maker and the material?
I also began questioning many of the things I had accepted as improvements. Not every faster process is better. Not every new tool is an improvement. Not everything that saves time adds value.
Sometimes, what we call a shortcut is actually taking away an opportunity to learn. Sometimes, what we call efficiency is simply a way of using more resources without understanding the consequences.
I went to those villages thinking I could contribute something to their lives. I did not expect that a young boy making a wooden stool would make me question so many things about my own education and the way I had learnt to look at the world.
I still remember that afternoon. The boy sitting on the ground, the pieces of wood around him and my repeated suggestion to use a nail.
I wish I had understood it then.
He was not wasting time. He was learning something that I had never learnt, despite all my years of education.
And perhaps the biggest lesson was this: Just because we know how to make something faster does not mean we know how to make it better.
Sometimes, we need to slow down, sit beside someone and simply watch. Not with the intention of teaching, correcting or improving, but with the willingness to learn.
That afternoon in Janumdi changed something in me. It made me realise that the places we go to teach others can often become the places where we learn the most.
