Journey Into Nomadic Lifestyle
Nomad life (vimooz.com/festivalticker/tag/san-francisco-international-film-festival/)
Much like the website http://www.happenchance.net/pros-cons-of-a-nomadic-lifestyle/ attempts to portray nomads to us in just a few words “Nomad. Gypsy. Wanderer. Vagabond. Location-independent travel ninja. All these terms describe a person with a nomadic lifestyle. They love variable scenery. They move from neighborhood to neighborhood, town to town, or country to country, doing what human evolution tells them to do: keep moving.”
Aimlessly wandering towards their next destination, a destination which gets to be spotted with one’s eyes closed on a map engraved only in one’s mind or sometimes on paper-this gets to be the way in which many people tend to envisage nomads. A rather romanticized idea of what real nomads happen to be, if you ask me. Though there seems to be great unpredictability in their wandering about, many of those insisting to see poetry even in this lifestyle would probably be surprised when discovering that a nomad’s constant refusal to settle down in one place and a nomad’s almost constant movement from one place to another gets to be far from vagrant. It is more than just a random wandering, yet a wandering having in it the attribute of prearrangement. By taking a simple look into the yard of nomads one would be able to notice that the lands making the object of their vagabondage do not always happen to be the most resourceful lands and certainly not the friendliest environments, but instead rather harsh living ones.
Nomads call home all those extrinsic areas like tundra, steppes and deserts, areas where the few resources hosted by these happen to be scattered unequally across “wide territories”. And thus as a direct consequence, nomads have to travel wide and across to just find the necessary resources to live…
The nomad gets to be a voyageur across the steppe or the tundra or the desert, a voyageur sometimes wandering herds or hunting and fishing or sometimes only searching for some wild plants meant to become his next meal. These wandering voyageurs will be met on the Asian continent, in the arctic and subarctic regions and even in certain parts of Australia and Africa.
Taking the globe in one’s hand and spotting the Siberian arctic there on the globe, one recalls in his mind the name of the Nenets. Nenets which get to be the still living guardians of a style of life long forgotten by many, migrating yearly over a thousand kilometers, taking their crowded reindeer herds to a rightfully deserved promenade towards the winter pastures located just south of the Arctic Circle. This gets to be a migration covering the south and north cardinal signs as well as two seasons, namely summer and winter and a whole multitude of reindeer aiming towards better pastures (greener ones assuredly).As I found it written somewhere and I ended up smiling, in this nomadic migration of the Nenets “No one knows for certain whether it is the reindeer that lead the people or vice versa.”
What gets to be sure though is the fact that the lands inhabited by these people, namely the lands of the Yamal Peninsula and its surroundings, happen to be just about the most provocative environment by means of its harsh climacteric conditions, a not so friendly environment where temperatures slough off to -50C. What is sure is that your routine and your crayoning of a nomadic lifestyle may certainly not fit into the image of the life of the Nemets. For each and every of us probably, nomadic life does not mean traversing frozen lands with frosty temperatures biting our noses and it certainly does not include any large river there, a river that though “deeply frozen” needs to be crossed over. Instead it brings in the need to just explore new territories, friendlier ones this time, unless some need of adventure signaled there.
Yet the Nenets dwelling in tents while not being involved in their “subzero migration” are not the only examples of nomads carrying on with their lives always on the move. From the Subarctic region we are heading towards the foothills of the Himalaya, somewhere “along the border separating India and Nepal”, an area where the so called Raji nomads continue to “hunt for wild honey”. No matter how many risks this marathon for wild honey involves these nomads of the jungle as they have often been referred to, feel and all the more are ready to take some action and climb up the tallest trees of the Terai jungle to just gather the treasured work of “the biggest migrating bees in the world.” I would call this a brotherhood into migration, mainly because Raji nomads and these bees highly treasured for their honey share their love or better said appreciation for the wild. None of them will give up doing what he does, neither will the bees stop migrating and settle down in the extreme heights of the jungle trees, nor will these nomads give up harvesting the honey of these bees and all the more risk their lives while doing this…I’d get to call this a nomadic equation of survival…
An equation which gets to be summarized best by the words uttered by Eric Valli who going deeper into the life of these people said: “The Raji are one of the last ethnic groups in Nepal still living in the forest as semi-nomads. Traveling for months in family bands, the Raji follow the bees as they migrate through the lowlands with the blossoming of flowers. Following this band, I would learn what it means to be as poor as dirt-and as rich as the earth.” These words together with the words of a leader of these nomads get to help one penetrate the life of these nomadic hunters of sweet wild honey “When city dwellers feel hungry, they go to a supermarket; when we are hungry, we go into the wood!”11
