A friend of mine, Rajesh Thind, is a UK-based documentary filmmaker who is making a documentary about the socio-political challenges faced by rural people in India. Below is an excerpt from his description of “Twelve Acres,” after you read it, please consider helping him out by donating a few bucks through the Chip In widget above. Thanks all.

Twelve Acres — that’s the amount of Punjabi farmland that I will inherit from my 70 year old father when he dies. The film will document my attempt to figure out what to do with this land when the time comes. More than that though, it’s a film about families, migration, and living outside of the constraints of the high-pressure urban life we live in London. That’s the skeleton on which the flesh of the film will hang…

The same pressures that people in Western cities are used to living under are increasingly at play in India. Fifty years worth of consumerism and materialism have been unleashed there in just the past decade or so, and the impact this is having on the lives on Indians is profound and wide-reaching.

Many of you have heard the terrible stories of farmers in India committing suicide because of the burden of debt, but we haven’t heard of what I found in my village and others around it – that teenage boys are killing themselves because their parents can’t buy them the shiny new consumer goods that their satellite TVs are exposing them to; that women are being killed by their husbands so they can get a new dowry; that young people see no future for themselves and are struggling to adapt to a new world.

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• india
• rajesh
• Rajesh Thind