Reporting from a state capital can be, to borrow from Plato, thrice removed from reality. So when I heard of a dairy event in Palanpur, the dusty border between Gujarat and Rajasthan, I got it assigned in my name. It would at least be an opportunity to study the chemistry between Sharad Pawar and Narendra Modi.

As Pawar began mumbling through his chief guest’s speech, describing food deficit to restive rural folk, my eyes turned to the vast milling audience in front. On an impulse I got up from my seat to get closer. A riot of colour lay ahead: rustic village belles in their finery, the protagonists of Benegal’s Manthan. The next moment I realised I was being watched, actually ogled at. The hypnotic gaze of kohl-lined eyes, the tinkle of their trinkets, the embroidery on their bright coloured fabrics, and the glow of their skin made redder by the filtering sunlight through the pandal, was mesmerising. Their men happened to be 100 feet away.

For a moment I thought of checking if the journey from Gandhinagar to Palanpur had done something to my biceps. Wrong. Thought of the girl in college who spurned me because I had a nose rather too aquiline to fit properly on my face. How unintelligent she must have been to miss me. And here I was the cynosure of hundreds of beautiful eyes, gazing furtively, even expectantly, at me. Like Krishna among his gopis, I thought.

The reverie was snapped by a voice. “Can you give that water bottle?” The organisers had provided it to me given my status as a journo. A hand was outstretched through the barricade and, before I could make sense of this, my not-so-shy milk woman took it away from me. Then came the second voice: “We have been sitting here since morning. Can you bring more water, we are all thirsty.”

... contd.