About the Songs

A farmer woman watches a researcher wander through her fields, muttering in a language no one understands. He marvels at her thriving crops and asks—what seeds, what methods, what secrets? She shrugs. No notes, no numbers, just years of watching, knowing, listening to the land. She shares her wisdom. He nods, scribbles, and later, a paper is published—thick with words she can't read, theories her son can’t explain. She looks at her fields, at the life she understands, and wonders—when she is gone, who will care for them like she does? Centuries of knowing, held not in books but in calloused hands—Mamta Bai, Rahi Bai, Balu Dada, and so many others who carry the land’s wisdom like second nature. And yet, knowledge slips through the cracks, like in the case of Khobragade—who, despite his immense contributions, died unable to afford his own hospital bills. If wisdom cannot sustain the very people who nurture it, then who is it really for? This song is for those whose truths are too vast for footnotes, yet too often lost in translation.

A woman watches as he eats—head down, phone in hand, barely tasting.
“You work so much,” she says. “But do you even see what’s on your plate?”
He glances up, confused. “Rice,” he shrugs.
She smiles, but her voice is firm. “What rice? What name?”
He doesn’t know. Not the grain, not the seed, not the hands that grew it.
“You don’t even remember these,” she says. “Are you still from this village?”
"Don’t say—‘what’s in a name?’ A name holds everything. Proof that something lived, that we belonged
to it, and it to us."
This song is for the vanishing grains, the lost names, the seeds turned into numbers in a ledger. Names
are not just words; they are portals—carrying history, memory, and land. Lose them, and we lose the
story of who we are.

A woman in the hills scrolls through her cousin’s WhatsApp DP—an office selfie, sharp and polished.
Hers is a field, wild and green.
Her cousin swears by chia and flax seeds, tiny superfoods from a packet.
Her daughter laughs. “These? We pluck them fresh from the garden.”
She lays out a meal—warm, simple, real. The cousin eats in silence, then sighs—years of hunger, quieted
in a single bite. “In the city, there’s plenty to eat,” she says, “but nothing tastes like this.”
She leaves behind heavy gifts, wrapped and priced. But in her bag, hidden—seeds, soil. The real gift,
weightless.
This song is about what we eat and what we forget. About food turned into products, about plenty that
lacks nourishment. About the quiet wealth of those who never needed praise, only the space to keep
living as they do.