Nothing’s changed here since 1947

Actor and social activist Rahul Bose has a moving piece in Hindustan Times on his experiences at Rehatyakheda, a village in central India.

"The village lives in darkness; its children are taught to play in the dark. Food is cooked during the day, eaten by the light of a kerosene lamp, carefully set at its lowest flame, at night. To save kerosene, 10 minutes is all they get to finish dinner.

The nearest medical facility is 30 km away. Pregnant women prefer to give birth in their huts rather than travel two hours on the bumpy dirt track to the nearest public health centre. They know the journey can lead to a haemorrhage (sic) and death, like it happened to those women who insisted on travelling to the nearest health centre. This situation has been the same since 1947."

Some part of the piece is naive – a celebrity realizing how dark is the country he inhabits, and some of the optimism is out-of-place. Yet, it is striking that Mr. Bose decides to spend time – no matter how little – in a place most of his peers from the film industry would not even know existed, and converts his experience into a hard-hitting mini-essay.

Read the entire piece here.