I too have a dream

My first post - I have to start somewhere - try and ignore my ramblings please and havepatience till I derive a method. Where do I start? Kya Bolun? WHat is right and what is not?
Well, let me start by sharing my dream
I am not a farmer by birth, nor do I have stories of all kind of stuff coming from my Gaon year after year - Like Mangoes, Ghee, Dal, Rice, Pickles etc. etc. etc. etc. Always used to envy my friends who would be blessed with such stuff. In fact I had always been challenged to say where is my gaon? Where do I belong too?
However, after these last 25 years of regularly working with farmers, rural India, Marginal community, cooperatives, people people and more people All I am sure of is I love this work which pays me to be with people, know and share their pains and their hopes and everything.
I have always considered myself as a very blessed or lucky person - lucky in having got a great start thanks to very visionary parents and brothers, lucky in having wonderful friends, lucky in partnering and being loved by one of the most wonderful persons in the world - Suchi, lucky with having two absolutely lovely and mad kids and lucky in having constantly got the the best from life so far and always much more than I ever asked for, dreamt for or ever thought possible.
So what more could I want from life?

Well, over these years, I now have another dream, a bigger and more engaging dream for myself and all the people who would wish me to share it with them. Having seen poverty and marginality constantly over these years, and having seen that what ever could go wrong would be goign wrong with such people - their each day and each moment being full of uncertainity and challenges, I want to partner at least one or two such households and help them help themselves by getting a secure livelihood and fulfill their aspirations for tehemselves and their children. Actually I dream for a role contributing to bringing lasting transformational changes for as many marginal farming households as possible.
Beyond this I also have a dream of constantly challenging existing methods and solutions - technical social and financial and evolving new and unique alternatives based on experiantial learning and respecting peoples aspirational goals.

Udayan is a tentative first step towards this. It aspires to be a learning farm, a farm for sustainable agriculture, a farm capable of fulfiling aspirational goals of the two marginal families settled on it, onw which would help me and my family connect not just to all the elements of universe directly, but connect in a way that we can cotribute back to it at least as much as we have got - as a humble thanks for all the luck and goodness we have got always.

Through these pages we Suchi and I - in our 25th year of co-commitment - will be trying to share our experiences, our learnings, and our thoughts, and seeking all yours too to help us move closer to our goal and our dream.
more on the specifics of the dream in next post
At 45 I am at cross roads, Wonderful 45 years behind, but a restlessness never felt before -f for makign the next few years as much more meaningful as possible to others less frtunate than me.

The Unfolding of a Development Story

In June 2009, our family started a new phase of life. We started working on 12 acres of rocky wasteland in Seoni district, MP, to develop it into an organic farm. Not only was the land rocky and uncultivatable, there was no water or electricity available. The nearest village was over 2 Km away. Our friends who saw the land in its initial stages barely tried to camouflage their scepticism... and it took our teenaged son to verbalise this openly and rather bluntly - "Yeh jagah dekhke toh nahi lagta iss mein kabhi kuch ugega!"

And Sudarshan, always the optimist, replied, "Ugega. Let us try." And so, 'Udayan' was born.

Today, 2.5 years down the line, Udayan has truly been a new beginning- for us, for the piece of land lying waste all these years, and for the local families who live on it and whom it provides for.

In this blog, we plan to document the story of Udayan, right from its bleak beginnings to what could prospectively be a bright future - for the farm, and the people whose lives are entwined with Udayan in some way or the other...