Footsteps to follow

Sometimes, it is nice to dig old incidents. This one crops up here because of Steinbeck's brief plot-synopsis within 'The Pearl' used as an archeologist’s tool. I remember how in a village scenario, tracking someone by merely looking down and following his foot-tracks is a simple skill.

Ten years back, fresh out of college, I used to get confused with the word 'footprint', for I had learnt that it means a foot-mark left on a surface. But, working my ass in a village called Patanka replacing traditional mud houses with houseowner’s organic designs, some two hundred odd of them, I used to have my more sophisticated friends talk and discuss, elitely, of a the same word 'footprint', but with a different meaning. More precisely, the word carbon was prefixed and the word became more than words. That time the grassroots concern was somewhere else, and now you can see it is a global concern now.

My concern stays smaller. It is of the skill, the skill which John published of back then in 1947; the skill of tracing/chasing someone wanted or unwanted by following the footprints left on the dusty ground. The melancholy plot-synopsis is of Kino chased during his run. Reminded me of how I was chased by the best chasers of Patanka , a community called Rabari, basically, grazers here who own a lot of sheep and flock, lowest in that village's social ladder of four to five categories. Vajabhai, chased me to be allotted his quota of cement, and complained I had been the toughest catch in his life. My job was to walk around and visit different houses that were being built, to inspect that they were being done proper. He complained that I would circle and walk too much. This made me happy then, and now makes me proud when I look back, for they were good times as we cracked them as jokes. When I discussed this with others in the village, the superior people of the village, they told me that these grazaers are best with this technique of foot following and are usually of help to the community when a theft had taken place. As soon as a theft alarm is raised, unknown footsteps are followed, wrong ones eliminated and a track path invented, in a particular direction, with probabilities worked out that in which village would the thief would have gone to. Villages here, then and now, are distributed by a distance of five to ten kilometers in an average. If pursued, it took a month or two to apprehend the thief.

Now, slowly most of these villages are access roaded with roads that are super highways, otherwise called expressways, motorways or freeways. It can be a useful observation to find how much of the footprint identification skill still remains. I am talking of the smaller issue.