A barefoot man showed up while I was at Bird Village in Orissa. Upon learning that a group of people were helping villagers plant fruit trees, he had come to share an important message with their leader. The message: “The leaves of the moringa tree prevent 300 diseases.”
He was a Vaidya, the practitioner of India’s ancient medicinal arts, and he lived in a remote hinterland more than 100 miles away from Bird Village. It had taken him four days to travel by foot and bus. He was neatly dressed in white, native clothes, with a gray handlebar mustache. He carried no luggage and wore no shoes. He said he was 80 years old, but he looked much younger.
I treated him with due respect, as I did all of the visitors to the villagers, but I did not believe his preposterous claim about the moringa tree.
“If this tree is so good, why hasn’t it been recognized in the Western medicinal literature?” I asked him.
“It shall happen,” he said gently, but with great confidence.
That is what is wrong with India, I thought to myself. Here is a poor man living in the poorest part of India, which has been frozen in time for millennia. He has never seen other parts of India, nor does he know anything about Western medicine. Yet he dares to predict what Western medicine will do. It is this arrogant weight of the dead past that has kept India in darkness.
The man stayed with us that night at the camp and talked freely, with great dignity and authority, yet never repeated the message he gave me upon his arrival. That night, he washed his clothes and hung them up to dry. They were his only possessions. Realizing that this trip was sacrificial for him, I offered to cover his travel expenses, but he did not want any part of that.
The next day, I saw him leave. He did not look back as he strode on that dusty path. It seemed to make no difference to him that I did not give credence to the message he had delivered. It was as if he had been waiting to deliver the message and now his job was done.
I felt that since his message was not important, he was not important. I did not think it necessary to get his name or the name of his village. I saw him fade back into the ancient past from whence he had emerged.
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