We the Facebook farmers...

Some of us are farmers, on Facebook that is. We keep asking each others for nails, horseshoes, logs of wood and other stuff. We sow, reap and harvest and win medals or pats on our backs, and envy and praise from each other. We love farming - thus assumably we love the green, the land, the manure, the grass, the shrubs and the horses and cows on our farmlands.

Do we also love the 'real' farmer? For whom farming is not a 7 minute break between writing proposals or preparing presentations, but a task, which, if neglected, will return to haunt them in the form of debts and starvation? The illiterate, uncouth, lower caste man (and many a times woman - though the image of the farmer is male and farmeress is not yet a valid noun) whose feet are sticky with eternal mud and who can only give a thumb impression? Do we feel a bond of brotherhood/sisterhood with him/her? Did we cry foul when the State took away the fertile acres of land of these farmers? Did we protest when the State put fire to acres of paddyfield so as to obtain the land for building residential complexes (am talking of DLF Rajarhat)? Did we feel one with the man/woman who have nothing to fall back on but the yield and for whom there will never be any compensation because (i) they were landless farmers who never owned the land they cropped; (ii) because they opposed the State, so the State will obviously not take care of them in return!

I am not sure....but I would want to believe we, the group of Facebook farmers, did that ... that we did feel one with the 'real' Indian farmer...