{"id":1088,"date":"2024-03-13T11:52:42","date_gmt":"2024-03-13T11:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/?p=1088"},"modified":"2024-03-14T09:27:42","modified_gmt":"2024-03-14T09:27:42","slug":"the-indian-shepherd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/shorts\/the-indian-shepherd\/","title":{"rendered":"The Indian Shepherd"},"content":{"rendered":"

This man is a shepherd in modern-day India.<\/p>\n

He has a gentle, obliging demeanor; an honest and engaging smile; and an unassuming presence, as if content in his little corner of the world and demanding nothing. He is 40 years old.<\/p>\n

He owns about 1,000 sheep, he says, which he tends with his brothers six months out of the year, away from his wife and children, away from his home. I met him at a government-run veterinary clinic where he was arranging treatment for his dog.<\/p>\n

The dog, a purebred bhutia, has no name. For him the animal is a tool and to name it would be to lose objectivity.<\/p>\n

He crafted his own coat from wool from his sheep. He also crafted his hat.<\/p>\n

I asked him how many children he has, and he told me one. By my reckoning he has three. He doesn’t count his two girls.<\/p>\n

He is not poor. His coat would fetch more than a week’s wages in many jobs; his dog ten times that. And he also owns an apple orchard. All in, he earns more than the doctor treating his dog.<\/p>\n

He studied a little as a child, in the 1990s, until age 12. But his heart wasn’t in it. He knows a few English words but doesn’t speak or understand the language. (The vet translated for me.) <\/p>\n

His father was a shepherd. So was his grandfather and great-grandfather. Probably further back, too — for how long no one knows for sure. But his son wants nothing to do with the historic family business. The son has aligned himself with the new India: he is technologically oriented and upwardly mobile, educated and informed, ready to join the modern world.<\/p>\n

But why?<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most striking feature of the shepherd is this: He is happy. “I have no stress,” he says, not boastfully, but rather as though he can’t imagine where stress could possibly come from.<\/p>\n

What is the son escaping from? And what is he running toward?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Veterinary Clinic in Mussoorie, India<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The<\/a>
The Shepherd<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps the most striking feature of the shepherd is this: He is happy. “I have no stress,” he says, not boastfully, but rather as though he can’t imagine where stress could possibly come from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1087,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[13,236,7,4,148,5,235,83],"class_list":["post-1088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-shorts","tag-cultures","tag-education","tag-happiness","tag-india","tag-mussoorie","tag-poverty","tag-shepherding","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1088"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1102,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions\/1102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}