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Book Name:Contemporary Essays People Unlike Us. The India That Is Invisible Publisher: Harper Collins India Year: 2001 Pages: 214 Price: Rs. 295 ISBN: 81-7223-427-9

8.30 am a typical weekday morning. I am out early hoping to make it in to work on time but no, the level crossing defeats me as it has defeated me so often in the past. I stand and wait in a snarl of traffic while the black and yellow pole descends like an act of fate. Around me I can hear the complaining horns and the babble of voices of commuters stuck like myself in mid-journey. I can hear Bengali and the rough Hindi of the taxi drivers.

We wait five minutes, ten minutes. There is no sign of the train. The warning siren from the crossing is a constant irritant to our ears. The only people with relative freedom are the children who live in the little shanties that have sprung up around the crossing. They run backwards and forwards, ducking under the pole. They’ve got a death wish! someone screams, but no, they know how to slip out from under the very wheels of a train. But that’s because they know the rules of passage. Another person trying it would be sliced under those wheels.

This is a book about the people like the borderline children who live round the level crossing, people very unlike us from places that we will probably never visit. People who live on the margins, nursing their silent rage. Villages on the borders of Kashmir and Pakistan, a village buried in the heart of Madhya Pradesh where people live by their own rules forgotten by mainstream society. People Unlike Us, Contemporary Essays is an extraordinarily rich collection of contemporary writing by six journalists and two other writers. Meenal Baghel, Siddhartha Deb, Sagarika Ghose, Muzamil Jaleel, Randhir Khare, Sankarshan Thakur and Vijay Jung Thapa.

There are eight essays in this collection. It is the third in a series of what HarperCollins calls "experiments in interpretative journalism". The first, 'Guns and Yellow Roses, was on the Kargil conflict, the second, On the Abyss was on Pakistan after General Pervez Musharraf's coup. While subjective, interpretative journalism is common in America and Europe, it has yet to make its presence felt in India.

All the essays are solid tales with a core that moves, though the telling is not always equal to the task. We are told the history of a sati in a lost village at the back of the north wind in Uttar Pradesh. There is the tragic star-crossed tale of the hanging of a Jat girl and a Chamar girl, too grim in the end to be the stuff of romance because unlike Romeo and Juliet neither side wiped their eyes and resolved that it would never happen again the feeling that remains in fact is a certainty that justice was done and that despite Independent India’s determination on secularism. There are other reflections: on the alienation of people in the northeast from the rest of the country, on the caste conflict in Bihar, the backwash of the Orissa cyclone and the tale of a maid in Delhi, rather ad-ily entitled ‘Maid in India’ .

Randhir Khare's essay on his involvement with the Bhils of Jhabua is the one that stands out, not only because of the language, but because it is the widest ranging in its scope it tells the story of how the son of a Bhil shaman flees his village after his father's death, desperately trying to find an Indian identity for himself while turning his back on everything the old man stood for. To be a Bhil, he feels, is to be less than human, especially in the context of modern India where attitudes have not changed from those of Tod’s Rajasthan. The essay covers 50 pages, pages in which Khare gives us glimpses of the past of the Bhils, a society that was abused by colonists, historians and politicians simply because it was misunderstood. After all, in a forward-looking country there is no room for communities lost in their anthropological pasts.

Khare describes his own attitude to the Bhils, developed over several visits, where he comes to realise that their unhygienic erratic ways are actually a live and let live way of life that is based on a respect for the beliefs and customs of others a respect that the tribals are deprived of. He feels that rather than force the Bhil to conform, to leave their old ways behind and become part of the world outside, it is better to record and understand them, to give them back a feeling of "being wanted, a feeling of belonging".

In the end these essays try to do just that for all the communities that they describe. People who need to feel they belong because the world is passing them by. As we move into the twenty first century, it is good to take a look at the India that we have no time for, an India where little has changed and where the playing fields are not, and can never be, level.

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