I can see that still, small village…

I am reminded of the small village where I was born. Why existence should have chosen that small village in the first place is unexplainable. It is as it should be. The village was beautiful. I have traveled far and wide but I have never come across that same beauty. One never comes again to the same. Things come and go, but it is never the same.

I can see that still, small village. Just a few huts near a pond, and a few tall trees where I used to play. There was no school in the village. That is of no great importance, because I remained uneducated for almost nine years, and those are the most formative years. After that, even if you try, you cannot be educated. So in a way I am still uneducated, although I hold many degrees. Any uneducated man could have done it. And not any degree, but a first class master’s degree – that too can be done by any fool. So many fools do it every year that it has no significance. What is significant is that for my first years I remained without education. There was no school, no road, no railway, no post office. What a blessing! That small village was a world unto itself. Even in my times away from that village I remained in that world, uneducated.

I have read Ruskin’s famous book, Unto This Last, and when I was reading it I was thinking of that village. Unto This Last… that village is still unaltered. No road connects it, no railway passes by, even now after almost fifty years; no post office, no police station, no doctor – in fact nobody falls ill in that village. It is so pure and so unpolluted. I have known people in that village who have not seen a railway train, who wonder what it looks like, who have not even seen a bus or a car. They have never left the village. They live so blissfully and silently.

My birthplace, Kuchwada, was a village with no railway line and no post office. It had small hills, hillocks rather, but a beautiful lake, and a few huts, just straw huts. The only brick house was the one I was born in, and that too was not much of a brick house. It was just a little house.

I can see it now, and can describe its every detail… but more than the house or the village, I remember the people. I have come across millions of people, but the people of that village were more innocent than any, because they were very primitive. They knew nothing of the world. Not even a single newspaper had ever entered that village. You can now understand why there was no school, not even a primary school… what a blessing! No modern child can afford it. I remained uneducated for those years and they were the most beautiful years.

Osho, Glimpses of a Golden Childhood, Ch 1 (excerpt)