Rescuer Community Syndrome
- Madhukar Dama
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
The Real-Life Tragicomedy of Rural Roots, Urban Minds, and Endless Failed Communities
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PROLOGUE
They were born in soil.
Their parents were farmers, teachers, artisans.
They grew up on hot rice, river swims, and transistor radios.
Then came education.
Scholarships. Coaching centres. English medium.
They left villages and came to cities — Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai.
They got degrees, got confused, and discovered words like “sustainability,” “decolonisation,” “capitalist structures,” and “trauma-informed praxis.”
And suddenly, they couldn’t breathe.
Everything looked fake — jobs, marriages, malls, patriotism.
They didn’t want to work in a cubicle.
They wanted to help people like the ones they came from.
So they created communities.
And failed.
Again.
And again.
And again.
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CHAPTER ONE: WHO THEY WERE BEFORE THEY STARTED SAVING OTHERS
1. Rajaraman (45)
Born in Tiruvannamalai to a family of weavers.
Topped his district. Got into IIT Madras.
Worked in Singapore, quit at 40.
Now wears khadi and talks about agro-economies on Clubhouse.
2. Praveen (31)
Came from Gadag, Karnataka. Parents still grow onions.
Studied at NID Ahmedabad. Never fit in.
Now lives in a shared flat with a ceramicist.
Uses phrases like “intersectional trauma in development narratives.”
Never returned home for Sankranti after 2018.
3. Divya (28)
From a Telugu-speaking village near Kurnool.
Schooled in a convent, then studied social work in TISS.
Married an IAS officer, regrets it every Diwali when she has to smile at his bosses.
4. Surya (35)
Grew up in a temple town near Udupi.
Father was a priest, mother a music teacher.
Failed CA twice, then became a wandering bard.
His poems are popular with urban feminists, but unreadable to everyone else.
5. Lekha & Arun (33 & 34)
Grew up in Coimbatore and Erode respectively.
Got scholarships to Berlin. Found love. Found compost.
Now live in a rented mud house in Tamil Nadu where they host "healing soil" retreats.
6. Ajay (26)
From a farmer family in Chitradurga.
Cracked JEE, went to IIT-Bombay.
Quit Amazon to build a rural museum of indigenous rainwater systems.
Still lives with his parents, who keep asking when he'll marry.
He replies: "I'm married to the Earth."
---
CHAPTER TWO: THE FIRST ATTEMPT — “SAARTHI SANGHA”
They met on a panel discussion titled:
"Restoring the Rural Heart: Conscious Communities Beyond Capitalism"
Held at a Bengaluru eco-café. Entry fee was Rs. 450 (chai extra).
They bonded over millet cookies and parental guilt.
Someone whispered:
> “Let’s start our own community.”
They launched:
> Saarthi Sangha – Guiding India from Inner Scarcity to Social Sovereignty
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The First Month: Magical Realism
Instagram posts with bullock carts, barefoot elders, and banyan trees.
Zoom calls every evening with vision boards and ambient flute music.
Group discussions on caste, consent, and cow-based economies.
Rajaraman quoted Ambedkar.
Praveen designed a logo with seven hands of seven skin tones holding a neem branch.
Divya raised funds via her IAS husband’s Rotary contacts.
Ajay made a Notion dashboard for “trauma-safe workflows.”
They were healing.
They were high on purpose.
They were completely disconnected from the actual villagers.
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Month 3: The Heartbreak
Surya left because Rajaraman didn’t include his poem in the newsletter.
Divya accused Praveen of “urban gaslighting via design aesthetics.”
Ajay cried during a team call when Arun used the word “deliverables.”
Arun and Lekha got into a fight because someone brought packaged coconut water to a zero-waste retreat.
A donor asked for accounts. Praveen said, “We don’t believe in colonising numbers.”
Final message before disbanding:
> “I no longer feel spiritually safe in this frequency.”
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CHAPTER THREE: THE NEXT WAVE — “JANMA-PATHA TRUST”
Lekha and Arun moved to a small hamlet in Tirunelveli district.
Built a bamboo retreat space with cob walls and compost toilets.
Started Janma-Patha Trust
(meaning: “The Path Back to Birth”)
They invited everyone for a 4-day immersion:
> “Return to your root memory through ancestral land holding and barefoot inner work.”
Day 1:
Cow therapy, group sobbing under a tamarind tree
Day 2:
Ajay gave a presentation on “uncolonising solar panels”
Divya walked out midway
Rajaraman had acidity
Praveen broke down during the "Seed Planting as Emotional Metaphor" session
Day 3:
A goat peed on someone's yoga mat
A fire ant bit Arun on the left butt cheek
Surya left again because he saw a laptop charging near the neem tree
Retreat ends.
The bamboo hall now houses sacks of horse gram.
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CHAPTER FOUR: FROM HOPE TO MEMES
They form new groups every year:
“Mud & Mindful” — fails due to a fight over which drum beat is least patriarchal
“Consent-Centric Community Kitchens” — shuts down when no one wants to cook
“Sustainable Sangha App” — no downloads
“Healing Dalit Futures” — fights over whether savarnas should even be on the board
“Return to Roti” — no one could make rotis
They join each other’s projects, sabotage them, leave, then start new ones.
Sometimes, they don’t even change the fonts.
The rescued?
Villagers smile politely, then go back to fixing borewells, planting ragi, and laughing at the rescuers behind their backs.
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CHAPTER FIVE: GRANDMA SAYS NOTHING — BUT DOES EVERYTHING
In the same village, lives Ammamma Radhamma (69).
Widow. Lives alone.
Grows greens. Feeds 10 orphaned girls.
Runs a free tuition class.
Never called it a community.
She once said to Praveen:
> “You came to the city to learn. Not to forget.”
She doesn’t have a trust.
Doesn’t apply for grants.
But has done more work than all of them combined.
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CONCLUSION: A DISEASE OF NOBLE CONFUSION
These rescuers are not selfish.
They are not foolish.
They are simply wounded idealists with rural hearts and urban minds, stuck between longing and guilt.
They keep building communities because they don’t have one themselves.
They keep rescuing others to avoid facing themselves.
They keep failing because their pain is louder than their listening.
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TEN DEEP TRUTHS FROM THIS TRAGICOMEDY
1. The trauma you haven’t faced will show up in your team meeting.
2. You cannot create community from emotional bankruptcy.
3. Every failed collective reflects a wound that wasn’t healed.
4. Good design doesn’t mean good work.
5. Stop rescuing people who are not drowning.
6. Don’t bring theory to a village that just wants to fix its borewell.
7. Real change is not romantic. It’s repetitive, boring, and invisible.
8. The oppressed don’t need saviours. They need partners.
9. A grandma with no degree and full heart will always beat a PhD with burnout.
10. Rescue yourself before you plan your next “retreat.”
---
“You Came to the City to Forget”
(A Bukowski-style Poem in an Indian Body)
they were born
under tiled roofs
where buffaloes farted freely
and grandmothers knew
when a child had fever
by touching the belly.
they were born into
mud,
pungent pickles,
morning radio,
and mothers who fed
from hands not charts.
and then
the scholarships came.
and the syllabi.
and the ceiling fans that hummed
in hostel loneliness.
they sat in A/C classrooms
where their names were mispronounced
and their accents laughed at.
they forgot
how to grow things.
they memorised
how to say
“intersectionality”
without knowing how to
say sorry to their own fathers.
they got degrees.
tasted quinoa.
joined webinars
where people said
“resilience”
while drinking Starbucks.
and then
one day
they broke.
they looked around
and said —
“this is all shit.”
they quit.
quit the jobs.
quit the apps.
quit shaving.
and returned —
not to the village —
but to an idea of it.
they made communities.
trusts.
sanghas.
networks.
coalitions.
fellowships.
summits.
retreats.
they rescued.
from a distance.
with Canva.
with Instagram reels.
with big words
and bigger wounds.
they said —
“the village needs us.”
but the village
was at the borewell
not the boardroom.
they made logos.
burned out.
fought.
cried on WhatsApp.
wrote apology emails
with “holding space”
and “emotional labour”
pasted
like coconut chutney
on cheap bread.
they broke
each other’s hearts
with terms like
“patriarchal tone”
and “holding trauma insensitively
in shared containers.”
they couldn’t cook.
couldn’t sit in silence.
couldn’t carry a sack of rice.
but they talked
for three hours
about co-creating circular healing economies.
they left again.
and again.
and again.
they built 19 initiatives.
all dead.
killed by difference
or boredom
or the slow suffocation of their own loneliness.
meanwhile,
Paati Radhamma
grew greens,
taught orphans,
and never posted about it.
she said,
“you came to the city to forget —
not to remember wrongly.”
but they couldn’t hear her.
they were busy
writing Medium posts
on “why I needed to leave my community to love it again.”
somewhere,
in a dusty room,
a villager opened the gift
sent by one such saviour —
a menstruation tracking app
in English
on a cracked phone
with no data.
they closed it.
went to pluck spinach.
and never thought of it again.
but the saviour?
he kept thinking.
he kept saving.
he kept
failing.
and in every new collective,
he heard the same voice
at night —
quiet,
far,
soft as old riverbeds:
> “Rescue yourself,
before the next sangha swallows you.”
