Losing currency?

When was the last time a nadaswaram player came to your door in the city, playing your favourite tune? Does the knife sharpener still call out asking if your cutting tools need a doing over? Some of us have seen these purveyors of expertise sometime or the other, maybe even transacted business with them. The rickshaw-puller in Kolkata. The knife-sharpener from Arakkonam. The lakeside barber and ear-cleaner in Srinagar. The itinerant nadaswaram player. The parrot astrologer. The pavement tailor. The travelling acrobat. Job done, we've moved on. But Nidhi Dugar Kundalia has followed them home, so to speak, and shared what she saw and heard in a small book. Indeed, in the larger scheme of things, 11 professions may be a minuscule number in a country like India, especially for those with an interest in the subject. Still, The Lost Generation: Chronicling India's Dying Professions is unpretentious and, for the most part, nonjudgmental collation of interview-based writings that draws attention to livelihoods that are on the edge, and the world of insights they unravel.

I found the new and old worlds intersecting in unpredictable ways even as modernisation spreads through the country. Outside Vikarabad, in Telangana, I met in a church compound a lady gravedigger who had taken up her father's job – a job originally reserved for lower-caste men – despite protests from her community.