India's wealthy go back to nature

The village is set on a 12-acre farm

Some of India's richest people are paying $150 a night to live like peasants at a "native village" in the southern state of Karnataka.

The village, Hessargatta - just outside India's IT capital, Bangalore - is designed to encourage the preservation of some of India's rural traditions.

It offers visitors the chance to qualify in tasks like milking cows and looking after the other animals, such as turkeys, ducks, chickens and dogs.

"It's great having these farm animals, because for the urbanites - there are lots of people who looked at the turkey and said, 'what is that?'" Ram Kumar, who came up with the idea and who runs the village, told BBC World Service's Culture Shock programme.

"The only time they have seen the turkey is on the table for Christmas."

Simple life

Designed to be environmentally-friendly, the village swimming pool is in fact a pond, and kept clean by aquatic plants rather than chemicals. The plants feed on the skin tissue shed when swimming.

There is also an open area, on which residents play traditional village games and fly kites, and a temple.

"The only difference here is that our village temple is a little more secular, so you have the Indian gods, mother Mary there, an Islamic symbol - we just want this to be a place of worship for everybody," Mr Kumar said.

In every city and every culture, you're finding this recreation of the farmland ideal for the city person Trend analyst Martin Raymond

Transport around the village is by bullock cart ride - "probably the slowest ride you'll ever go on".

"You get to notice so much more when you're on a bullock cart. You are able to see butterflies, bees, the turkeys walking next to you. Because of the slow pace, you notice so much more of life. It's quite philosophical in my view," Mr Kumar added.

Trend analyst Martin Raymond, director of the Future Laboratory, told Culture Shock there is a hankering for a simple life across the world.

"What you're seeing in India, for example, is 25 million middle-class people who would find this an attractive offer, because it fulfils part of their life," he said.

"It's an attractive lifestyle, one that you can't remember, but one that your parents told me about.

"It is this thing about reconnecting - you're finding it in every city and every culture, this recreation of the farmland ideal for the city person."

This urge to "reconnect" is described by some psychologists as the "Marie Antoinette syndrome" - recreating ideals that never actually existed - after the French queen who masqueraded as a dairy maid and build a vast farm to "live as the peasant lived".

"If you really live in these places, they're incredibly harsh and difficult environments," Mr Raymond said, adding that it is a "paradox" that people are paying $150 a night to live in the conditions that others are seeking to escape.

"You have people travelling from outlying areas to visit these temples of the future - air-conditioned super malls and skyscrapers - and you see people thinking, 'this is the future and it's landed in my garden'," he said.

"It's really a swap-over situation, where the people who live in these malls are thinking 'what have we forgotten and neglected', and then they travel and do their tour of duty to show they're reconnected with their culture."