Excerpt -
Two people who changed my life I was like a western educated man in pants and shirts. But two people - Paulo Freire and Vinoba Bhave - changed my life completely. An article by Paulo Freire in the magazine Idea and Action published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, Rome dwelt on participatory development and participatory education, and said if you wanted to do any development for the people, you also should participate in the process.
For that, you should go to their level. So, I decided to change myself in my dress, behaviour and attitude, and be one of them.
Vinoba Bhave wrote in the same magazine that education is a process of giving and pure theoretical education is not education at all.
When I started dressing up like them, all the farmers accepted me and embraced me as one among them. They started singing and dancing with me. I then understood that I was at the right place. I went from village to village trying to learn from them, in the process teaching them too about organic farming.
What I did first was to join hands with a young farmer who had two pairs of cattle. While he ploughed his field with one, I ploughed with the other. Ploughing was not new to me as I had done that in family fields too.
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