Need- The mirage of life

Need, other than the basic life saving ones, is a mirage. It makes devout out of atheists, believers out of skeptics even beggars out of kings or queens. Egged by it the world shrinks into a single whole and corrodes the human spirit thus peeling it off to a frayed figure. When driven by the force, reason and logic deserts the seeker making the situation all the more dismal and abject. What all can see as sheer futile effort makes the needy turn into a monomaniac and devote the last breath in fulfilling the want. If only the pointlessness of the pursuit dawned upon the pursuers, so much vain effort could be spared. Life is a mirage and most ruin half their life in search of the oasis that doesn’t exist. And even if the oasis is reached it appears shallow and fails to appropriate the efforts taken. Is this the essential tragedy, human life must undergo for tasting the forbidden fruit? 

The Flip Side

An official assignment took me to a slum at the outskirts of Kolkata. Being born in India and living in a Metro slum was not an alien word or concept for me. There are a couple of them in and around my area. My cook and maid come from two such. But the one I visited on the official visit left me dumbfounded to the core. The approach road from the NH that led to the area was enough to give fits but what lay ahead was abominable. The time of my visit being July the area was all the more hellish. No proper road existed except narrow pathways. Children like swarms of flies looked as pathetic as cannot be expressed in words. Each 6-7 yrs was carrying a 1-2 yrs old and almost all were half or full naked. It was a quagmire of phlegm, mud, rain water and other offal. Children smeared in mud and dirt picked ‘Ash phal’ (a seasonal fruit) from the heave of dirt and drank rain water seeping down from the slanting roof of a shabby grocery shop. At the center point was a congregation of young men. Their vain effort at resembling Salman or Shah Rukh made them look vulnerable in a way. As we passed the spot they passed lewd remarks. The decayed red teeth (result of chewing beetle nuts) actually reflected the decay of the society and so instead of irritating me made me thoroughly depressed. I could feel their despair and deprivation and felt a kind of guilt for wearing branded clothes and shoes especially when their feet were bare and soiled. I am no economist and don’t understand the jargons of the subject. But the word ‘inclusive growth’ is too conspicuous now-a-day to skip anyone’s notice. Lot is being said about the importance of the idea but one visit to Maheshtala was enough to see that till now it is just a phrase of two words creating storms over some expensive tea cups in some elite boardrooms. Amazing was the meeting with the father of ten who unflappably says he earns 100 bucks per day and spends most of it in procuring his daily share of country liquor and plans to engage his children in begging in order to fend for themselves. All the while the anemic wife of the haughty husband stood silently beside him with despondency written large in her sunken face. Their little brigade, it appeared to me, was their way of taking revenge to the unknown or may be to us (the favored ones).

On my return journey the faces I met kept popping up and Left me utterly disillusioned. The thing that was loud and clear to me was- My India is definitely not ‘shinning’!!