A harvest festival embracing nature

The visitors at the Poolani village on the banks of the Chalakudy river on Saturday were witness to a unique harvest festival of sorts, filled with activities that had a sole purpose — bring people closer to nature.The green village is an initiative of entrepreneur Das Sreedharan, who started it with the aim of educating adults about nature.As part of promoting its green cause, the day-long harvest festival saw visitors from across the country and abroad turn up.Naadan games such as clay modeling, making toys using coconut leaves and even mud sports were played apart from showing the visitors how to make battered rice (aval) and extract oil from coconut crush.Some like Oana from California, USA, were even on the paddy fields for four hours, harvesting rice crops. “It was an awesome experience to be in the field bare feet and have the mud between your toes. The fresh smell of the earth is something you don’t often get these days,” she says. “It was a truly rejuvenating experience.”Priyanka Vaidya from San Jose, is another regular visitor to Poolani, where she also teaches Abhyanga (oil massage) to the underprivileged students in the village.“it felt as if you were in some other world, away from all your modern gadgets — loving nature and being loved in return,” she says.The guests were also treated to a sumptuous spread made with the vegetables and rice cultivated within the village.On the event, Das Sreedharan, who is also a chef, says, “I wanted people not to just love food but also understand the purity and freshness of produce that we can grow in our own backyards.”An advocate for green living, he says that the onus right now is on the people to preserve nature. “Mother Nature has always been giving but we never stop demanding. That has serious repercussions. Like for instance, in the West, nature is turning against us and natural calamities such as the hurricanes are a result of that.”Das, who also runs a cooking class in the village for underprivileged kids, says, “We must teach the younger generations to love nature and adopt a healthy philosophy of living, and this comes from not torturing nature for all our materialistic needs.”He says that he hopes that the harvest festival that was organised for the first time in the village is a step in the right direction, and plans to hold more such events in the future.