Touch Me Not Village !
“Divining the difference between reality and the fantastic may not be as simple as it seems. Because the world you think you know may not actually exist…”
India is a land of mysteries, myths, urban legends, local folklore etc, land where some unbelievable practices or theories originate, land where still some ancient practices continue without anyone knowing why or what, land which has so many such stories that it needs to be dug deep in order to be brought out; basically never a dull moment for someone like me to look for my blog content !!
Distancing one self from others is a very common practice nowadays to help improve our mental health, in fact it’s very useful for one self to cut out all ties and get into that trance to focus on her future. Some great names out there have been doing this regularly to boost their creativity, one such name is the great Elon Musk. Of course after the pandemic ( touch-wood, sorry if I’m jinxing!), social distancing has been practiced very strictly, at least in books. And also the third and most stupidest kind of distancing, a disease still wrecking havoc on our country, you know what !!
Now, you all would have thought that there was some content missing or there is a mistake as there are two totally non related stories have been told; naah that was intentional ( basically didn’t have a better idea to connect them !) Yes, as the title says there is a mysterious village in India, where the outsiders are not allowed to touch anything especially not allowed to touch the native villagers in any way !! The village’s name is Malana, loacted deep inside the Kullu valley of Himachal Pradesh, here you have to pay fine if you touch anything that belongs to the village even by mistake, but you can definitely click their pics, including those of the villagers, so they are not quite shy !!
The villagers consider themselves to be the successors of “Sikandar”- Indian way of calling Alexander the Great, so they have a touch of Greek style to everything from construction ( almost all buildings are similar to each other) to food, they consider themselves to be higher than other human beings, maybe the reason for the “touch me not” behavior. Even though collectively their education standards are very low, they are the oldest democracy on Earth, yes shocking isn’t it, to add on, they also have a well defined Judiciary system, with Parliament sessions and two houses ( jayeshthang and kanishthang- lower and upper houses) to decide on disputes and other issues in which the state government never interferes. That’s too surprising isn’t, but wait the list doesn’t end here!!
It is a “Corona” free village ( with all the social distancing, a big “yes”), their Democracy is believed to be looked upon by “Jamlu Devta”, father of Lord Parashuram as per Hindu Mythology, so most of their decisions/judgements are more religious than rational. One of the visitor even says, “In a difficult decision to solve a conflict, they make a deep cut in the foreleg of a lamb each of the two parties, poison it, and then sew it back with needle. The person whose lamb dies first is said to lose the case.” They are more nature friendly, burning wood or hunting animals is not allowed without permission, police is not allowed inside but if someone needs their intervention, they have to pay a fine, now that came right out of the box !!
What are the takeaways here? As I say, there is always two sides of a coin, every story including this provides us with both the ‘pros’ and ‘cons’, the remaining is up to us to decide which one to focus on and improve upon. But the next immediate action is to plan a trip to this place, what a beautiful picturesque creation by nature, truly one to cherish; without touching !!
