Stories from the Field

Everybody Has To Play Together To Make Good Music! In village Pallia, block Barachawar, district Ghazipur, the atmosphere is almost like a big, happy picnic: everyone is sitting in the middle of the lone village road, surrounded by fields on one side and small huts on the other, as children scamper in and out of…

Mita Rawat, 30, says she is so ‘untouchable’ for her neighbor – an upper caste Brahmin – that even if she hammers a nail in the shared boundary wall, he removes it because it is ‘touching’ his house! “On good days, he just mocks me or prefers to just look away, but when he decides…