Dattu Landge, a young farmer from Washim district in Maharashtra committed suicide on September 10. He is survived by a wife and a toddler, who he kissed goodbye, before taking the extreme step of ending his own life. Landge wrote a few heart wrenching letters before he took his own life.

"You are a highly educated leader from Vidarbha and therefore we always backed you," he wrote to the Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadanvis. “We believed you will have a better understanding of farmers’ issues in Vidarbha. However, one gets the feeling that you are deliberately ignoring their problems. If you continue to do this, more young farmers from Vidarbha will end their lives,” Landge wrote in his note.

“You offer better perks, salaries and new pay commissions to government employees. You voluntarily offer help to industrialists to set up their businesses. Why not the farmers, then?” he asks Fadnavis.

Landge, had a Bachelor of Arts degree and even attempted the Maharashtra Public Service exams. He was not your regular farmer who would rely on the monsoon to water his fields. He had laid pipelines in his farm, but didn’t have electricity to pump water. “We are not afraid of drought, we are tired of the rulers’ apathy,” he wrote.

But here we are…cribbing over the porn ban, meat ban, beef ban, nightlife in Mumbai and every minute detail about Indrani Mukerjea's life and how and why she allegedly killed Sheena Bora. Our prime-time debates on television channels tend to move only around these topics.

Meanwhile, the real India is dealing with far more pressing issues in their lives, and these are as basic as electricity, water and food. Not even education.

It reminds me of a famous tale from Buddha’s life. Gautam Buddha was once invited to a village for his discourse. The entire village turned up except one farmer, who was worried about his ox that had gone missing. When Buddha waited for this farmer to find his ox, anxious disciples asked Buddha why he was delaying the discourse. Buddha smiled and said that anything he said would not make sense to a man who was pre-occupied with worries about his livelihood.

A similar sentiment is expressed in a song from the movie Gangs of Wasseypur. The song's lyrics read "ek bagal mein chaand hoga, ek bagal mein rotiyaan..." All our refined sense of culture, art, and all talks about freedom of expression and curbs on democracy are pointless for people like Dattu Landge and his family. Their issues and truly, the issues of over 70% of people in our country who live in villages, are entirely different from well-fed people like me.

I am a vegetarian and a teetotaler and yet, I crib over all the meat bans and nightlife. I get thrilled over the Rs. 90,000 crore Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train that is likely to come up in the next five years or a decade. But I am not too concerned about the 12 dams in Maharashtra that have as little as just 7% water left in them. A farmer in rural Maharashtra wrote to Dr. Uday Nirgudkar, the Editor and CEO of the Marathi news channel Zee 24 Taas as well as dna, that he was ready to sell his kidney, because he wanted money to save his family. The drought in Maharashtra is that severe. The floods in Assam are that devastating. So please, can we shift our public debates to the ground realities?