Exploring alternative living at MCVK
In the six years since we pulled our kids out of regular school and started our own, we have met many unlikely fellow travellers, and our journey has taken us to many unlikely places. These are people and places that are trying to fix the flaws of the current “system”. The main flaw in the current system is that it values wealth (insatiable accumulation of wealth) above all else. This makes us narrow minded and hyper-competitive individuals. The alternative systems are trying to define what it means to live a good life, outside the ambit of the capitalist system. Once such attempt is the Manav Chetna Vikas Kendra (MCVK) — loosely translated as Center for Growth of Human Awakening — in the outskirts of Indore in Madhya Pradesh.
This is my third such Diwali excursion in search of an alternative lifestyle after Sadhana Forest and LSUC. This time more than twenty parents and children from our school (Learner’s Collective) took the train to Indore to explore MCVK. A few of our co-parents had been to MCVK and we had heard great things from them. Since we had been to Sadhana Forest before, I understood that this is a co-living space where you are expected to contribute in the daily activity and labour of the day — unlike a hotel or homestay where your primary purpose is just leisure. Being a part of a system is much better than just being a spectator and also a great way to travel and meet people. I was excited to see how this experiment is shaping up and what I can learn from it.
After an overnight train journey, we landed in Indore in the morning. MCVK is an a hour’s ride away and keeping with our ethos of frugal travel, we decided to take the local bus. While waiting for the bus, we had some amazing Indori chat at the bus stand — samosas and kachoris. The bus dropped us 100m from the venue and we had to walk through the village of Pidwai to reach our destination. MCVK has a 17 acre campus in the middle of a dusty North Indian village, and feels like an oasis of green as soon as you enter. We dropped our bags at our dormitory and then went towards the lunch — which was simple beans, chapatti and rice.
Campus
After the meal, we were given a tour of the place by one of the residents. The MCVK campus has a “main street” that has houses on one side and their common facility on the other side, with buildings under construction. The biggest unit is the gaushala, a cow shed with more than 100 cows. The cow is a source of milk and also cow-dung which is used as a fertiliser and fuels a bio-gas plant. The gaushala was well organised and clean and there were children as well as adults who were working there, doing everything from managing cattle feed to milking the cows. They even had a tablet with an Android app (which they had made themselves) keeping track of how much milk had been extracted from each cow. Along with the cow shed, they also had a milk processing unit and they shared that they supplied milk to people outside as well.
There were several other “production” units — a soap making unit, a unit for extracting oil and other essence from plants, and a bakery. The bakery later became a favourite volunteering unit for our team. In the bakery they made various types of bread, cup cakes, cookies and also packed it and sold it outside. From the bakery, we went towards the farms — MCVK has several farms producing fruit, vegetables, grain and much more. One of the first things they did when they started in 2007 was to collect rainwater and replenish the water tables. Other than a few summer months, they are fully self reliant on their own water sources. They also have a solar farm that supplies more than 50% of their electricity needs. In their estimate, close to 80% of what they need in the campus is produced from within the campus, and the deficit is fulfilled by the sale of their produce.
The daily schedule starts at 4am in the morning, with breakfast at 6, lunch at 10.30am and dinner by 5.30pm, followed by a group discussion from 7 to 8pm. People were seen working right from 4am, right up to 6pm in the evening. MCVK has a community kitchen where simple vegetarian meals are prepared.
Philosophy
Seeing this entire system in action was inspiring, and it made me super curious to find out how it was organised and what was the driving force. It felt that the system was self-organising and I did not see any religious iconography. The purpose of inviting visitors like us was not only to experience how a self sustaining community like MCVK operated, but also to educate us on their philosophy. Over the next three days, there were a series of lectures organised for our group by various folks, to give us an introduction to their way of life. In these lectures they tried to cover the philosophies and ideas behind this system. Here is a gist of what I understood.
The fountainhead of MCVK is a guru named A Nagraj (1920–2016). Coming from a family of vedic teachers in Karnataka, he had access to the best of traditional vedic knowledge but he was not satisfied with the answers he received. According to him, religion failed to answer the basic question of human purpose. If the gods were perfect then why did they create a flawed world in the first place? Also he saw inconsistency in the way religion was preached and practiced. He also studied the material world, but it did not satisfy his spiritual needs either. The best explanation “science” had was that humankind was an “accident” of evolution. After a penance of several decades, he came up with his own philosophical treatise based on the idea of “co-existence” — called Madhyasth Darshan — “The Moderate Vision”.
According to what was shared to us, Madhyasth Darshan claims to be a complete theory of life and everything within, right from creation of the universe to how society should be organised. Some concepts that came out repeatedly were:
- All humans have the same disposition and the same needs and desires for happiness, respect, understanding, prosperity, fearlessness (somewhat like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), hence there can be a “way of life” that can satisfy all human needs.
- The way to a good life is to “awaken” yourself by learning about human nature, needs and behaviour.
- All problems can be solved with a co-existential mind-set, if they are understood from a humanistic perspective. Humans have to learn to co-exist with nature and other humans. The philosophy claims to have an answer to all questions of life based on this simple principle.
- People are more important than ideas. You can learn more from a person than from a book.
I read quite a bit about it online as well. The philosophy is mainly in pure Hindi with a lot of (non religious) Sanskrit terms, which themselves take time to get used to. We had several discussions on the philosophy in our group, with Pankaj and me being naturally sceptical of any utopia being presented to us. A lot of the discourse was about the failures of the current system which we were well acquainted with. The rest felt like a tedious, quasi-religious model with some practical ideas about human needs and wants mixed with faith driven ideas like rebirth and atomic consciousness. Whenever we asked questions, we often got the answer that “it takes time to understand”. Maybe we needed more time to appreciate it.
Organisation
The organisation was not very apparent to us and it required a lot of questioning to figure out. Their version of society is a hierarchical system run by awakened souls. Anyone can claim to be an “awakened” soul and declare that they have fully understood the darshan (vision). In the case of MCVK, it is the founder, Ajay Dayma who has claimed awakening under the darshan. The property itself is owned by Ajay and his family (from what we could find out) and the organisation legally operates as a trust. Ajay started by himself in 2007 and over the years, several other families who were followers of A. Nagraj joined him.
Currently there are 30 families, or 130 people living at MCVK. Some are families with children and some are young people who have come exploring a different way of life. Some people have come because they wanted better (organic) food, some have come because they were home schooling and wanted better education for their children. All these residents are organised into groups — these groups are either involved in production or education or management. Some of the units were — the gaushala unit, the bakery unit, the kitchen unit, the farm unit, and people are rotated every 15 days, with a fixed staff staying on for a longer duration. There is no direct requirement to put in labour, but I felt that there was peer pressure for everyone to work for 8–10 hours a day.
Planning, discussion and conflict resolution happens regularly via a daily gathering (which does not happen when there is a training going on, so we could not participate). Each “family” nominates one member to be part of a council of families that is headed by Ajay Dayma. Ajay, who is referred as Ajay bhaiya (brother) being the philosopher-king who runs the community in an enlightened manner. While many of the people seemed very satisfied with the arrangement, there were murmurs of discontent as well. Some of the youth I talked to were unhappy with this arrangement. “All the production happens because of our labour, but we don’t have a say in how things are organised” said one of them.
There is no concept of private property or salaries in this model — the entire community lives as one family, with Ajay bhaiya as the head. For those who are part of the community, they don’t have to worry about their needs — food, shelter, clothing, education of their children etc. In that sense, the deal is that if you submit, then we will take care of you. While it sounded very utopian, there were flaws as well. It felt like equality was missing. People who came in earlier had more rights. They had the biggest houses — some had private kitchens, while others had to join the mess for a common meal. Maybe these are things that will get solved as the community grows.
Experience
Overall, we had a great time at MCVK. The kids were either playing or doing work — they were helping out with the gaushala, or the farm, or the bakery, the kitchen, or just taking care of younger kids. They had very little time for “AV” or YouTube, because they were engaging in the real world. Sometimes we box-in our children so much that they have nothing better than pass time on social media.
Since it was Diwali time, we had a Diwali party where there were dances and songs from both the MCVK and our kids and parents as well. I personally spent time in helping out with some construction work, and some time cleaning plates or de-weeding in the farm. We even took time to visit the famous Sarafa market in Indore one evening. On other days, we went to the village chat stall for some delicious paani-pooris (Rs 10 for 5 poories).
Over the last six years, LC (Learner’s Collective, our school) has become like another family. We may not be perfect but we have come to trust each other. It is fun to see how everyone is comfortable around everyone else and how we all end up complementing each other.
If nothing, places like MCVK open up my own imagination of what life could be. Living in a city like Mumbai, we are so trapped in our own daily affairs that we don’t realise that there is always an exit. While things are going fine, the question arises whether this is a trap? What do we truly need to be happy? Are we doing things for our own happiness or just to prove to other people? If a few of us pool in our capital, we can easily build something like an MCVK — maybe on more democratic principles. I genuinely feel that places like MCVK are a stepping stone to better co-living. If we compare it to the traditional gated communities that are springing up all over our cities, we can see that they lack a strong community spirit. When we are the masters of our own lives, we lose the need to co-exist and that makes us lonely. Too much of a good thing is also bad.
It is not to say that places like MCVK are ideal. There are flaws in the way power and rewards are distributed, but can there ever be an ideal system? What we have accidentally found via our school is a sense that our destinies are some how entwined, and that has made us connected in a way to each other. And this has happened without an compromise on values. I guess value driven communities are probably the most aligned. When people value certain things, they have reached there after undergoing a journey within themselves. People living with different values can perhaps never truly be aligned.
I was very impressed with their process of finding value alignment. People have to undergo three separate trainings (Parichay — Introduction, Vikalp — Alternative and Adhayayan — Study) before they can commit more time and also there is a clear path to attaining value alignment. Some of the values of MCVK like sustainability, frugality, self-reliance, co-existence and non-transactional lifestyle were very appealing. Though I suspect, there is more than just value alignment — there is also people alignment that happens on the path.
While we should not judge people by their values, we will be most comfortable with those who share our values. The way to find people who share your values is either by finding spaces like MCVK or if you can’t find any, starting your own. I am sure once you start, people who believe in similar values will come and join.
The question is, do you have the imagination and courage to take the first step?
