Kothagudem-based Adilaxmi matches her mechanic husband’s skills in repairing tubes and tyres of two/three/four wheelers, trucks, earth movers and tippers. There’s Komera Jaazi, an Ayurvedic practitioner who cultivates sorghum on a one-acre field as manna meant for sparrows that are fast becoming extinct since cell phone towers cropped up in this corner of Andhra. Locals in Chintoor, East Godavari District, swear by a medicinal oil with secret ingredients that delays greying of hair.
These and other similar vignettes—of attempts at agrarian inventions or pure jugaad from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana’s hinterlands—are raking up likes and comments after getting featured as vlogs on Rural Media, a YouTube channel by award-winning journalist Shyam Mohan. Before this, the 55-year-old Hyderabadi was a cartoonist whose illustrations featured in international journals Entwicklungspolitik and Wendekreis, followed by stints at the edit desk of two mainstream Telugu newspapers. But in 2009, he quit legacy media after multiple instances of his tribal and rural stories getting “hacked mercilessly” and used as “fillers”, or even “killed” at the editing table. “I had so many leads on exclusive stories on problems experienced by farmers, Dalits and tribals, which were never given a proper response by the management.”
