Goat Herder's Daily Routine

In India, everything that happens in the lives of the poor seems coincidental. The son of a bonded laborer grew up tending goats. He witnessed daily the struggles and hardships of his poverty-stricken home, where his parents, despite their difficulties, strove to live with a strange self-respect and dignity, refusing to beg from others. Through his mother's work as a laborer, he began to understand the plight of working women across North Karnataka. In a time when there were no other possibilities, and no desire for them could even arise, the boy yearned to escape the rigorous hard work of school for the freedom of the fields where he herded buffaloes.

It was then that his accidental participation in a play became a turning point in his life. A doctor steered him towards the world of books. The touch of books ignited a small spark of creativity within him, and he wrote a poem. Goravar, who could not have even imagined becoming a storyteller, perhaps found that this entire world of memories later compelled him to write stories. It is this fundamental material that has now led him to write this memoir.

Through these personal and social memories, a world of experience, largely unfamiliar to Kannada literature, has entered through this book with diverse details. If Goravar had been a little selfish and stingy like all professional writers, and had explored this world of memories and its strange truths with more patience, he could have turned this series of memories into a rare novel. But what if? It seems that the unspoken and unexamined private details in Goravar's direct memories will undoubtedly become a novel someday. This expectation also indicates the significance of this book. Memoir

-Nataraj Huliyar