Some Gypsies Eat Rabbits Sometimes

A few nights ago, I was sitting in the office in the late afternoon writing email and doing research on handmade paper for my project. At some point this evening, one of the staff came into the office and asked me if I had a knife. I said no, but I offered him some scissors that I had seen on the desk. He laughed and left the room. A few minutes later he came back and asked me if I knew about gypsies. I said yes. He then told me that some gypsies live in Tamil Nadu and that they are part of some of the self-help groups that seek microcredit loans with ODAM. He told me that they travel around and catch wild animals for food. He then said that one of the guys from that group caught a wild hare and had it in the backyard of the office. Naturally, I went out to the back of the office had to check it out. There I saw the said gypsy standing proudly next to his catch. The animal had its hind legs tied together and its forelegs tied together, lying on a table and looking rough. It was alive but not happy.

I asked how he caught it and it was translated to me that he caught it the night before. He used a flashlight attached to his head and spotted the rabbit in the dark, threw a net on it, and caught it. He had been carrying it around all day in a wicker basket on his journey to get to our office to meet with staff. I watched the rabbit lying there for a little bit, then beaming, the guy started to sweetly pet the animal on the head. This creature was going to be this guy’s meal for the day. They were looking for a knife so that this guy could use it on this thing. I said "very good" in Tamil and left the man to his rabbit. Minutes later I heard the animal yell, and a rabbit yell is really one of the most eerie sounds to hear. Not long after that I went to go look and the rabbit was skinned and hanging from a tree outside the back of the office. They began their meeting and it was the most unreal sight to see. The staff were all sitting in chairs with this guy while his basic sustenance was literally hanging next to them.

The juxtaposition of the entire situation has continued to astound me. There were so many different elements at hand, I was so humbled by it. Firstly, I recognized again that I have no grasp on others' realities. I have seen gypsies in urban environments, and I have studied hunter-gatherer civilizations of the past, and I have heard of tribal rabbit hunting. With each of these situations, I've categorized and reached conclusions that make those things comfortable for me to be around, talk about, experience. But this event put it all together, and created an entirely different set of realities that destroyed my earlier, unquestioned understandings of those situations. All of a sudden, in the year 2010, a gypsy man from rural Tamil Nadu can catch a hare for dinner one night, travel for hours the next morning in order to negotiate getting a microcredit loan by joining state/NGO initiatives as part of a {developmentese} self-help group program, walk all that way, forget a knife, and ask some American-Tamil liberal girl to help him out. what?!? what just happened!?

In some ways, I feel like Christopher Columbus! I feel like there are entire worlds going on that I discovered, but they've been at it [survival] in their own ways for eons, yet never shared it with me, so now I feel ownership over this newfound knowledge. I am different from Christopher Columbus in that I won't exert my power and resources to exploit them, but I'm sure this sensation must've been the same when he landed in the Caribbean in 1492!


Secondly, I was amazed at how unskilled I am in a practical sense. In the next room, while this man was killing and preparing his food, I was sitting around on my MacBook 'doing important, timely things' for the organization. I had this realization after I read World War Z (a story of the global zombie war, where academics, lawyers, and historians are totally useless for bare survival strategy purposes) last summer. I can't hunt! Can I actually kill an animal with own hands? I wondered also what I would do if I did have a knife to offer. Would I be okay with letting him use it [to kill the rabbit/his dinner]? Ultimately, my answer was yes, but then my sensibilities of a privileged person removed from that process made me cringe at the idea.

Thirdly, I was so excited with this paradigm shift that I couldn't quit thinking about it for hours afterwards. I realized that this is an excellent feeling, and that I would like to spend my life having more of them. This would be most easily accomplished by reading alot, conversing alot, and traveling alot. As someone interested in social development and international globalization, I'm trying hard to be open to letting new realities influence me, to navigate newly voiced (or unvoiced) sensitivities, and to bring what I can offer to these projects in a way that strengthens rather than undermines the power of the 'local'. It's a constant challenge, and makes this the most exciting and hardest work I've ever tackled.