by Amartya Ghosh on June 7, 2009
Many of you must be thinking why this man is upto writing such a post in a bloomy Sunday evening not struck by the forecasted Aila? And afterall what is it all about? Well it’s nothing but my outburst, considering all a number of intolerable cases I have been facing in recent days happening to me, in neighbourhood, in roads in hospitals in ticket counters in auto rickshaws, in buses, shops, medical stores, theatres, temples, hotels, in day, at night and so on. Actually the count would have begun long back, but my thought process never used to push me so hard. And through this outburst of mine, i don’t want a sympathy or a protest, a mass appeal etc. I know that there are thousands like me who face the same day to day problems in and out, and they also feel disgusted and in a way feel like banging their heads with the walls and shout ‘why am I no a VIP, but an Indian?’
Directly I want nothing, but indirectly I would like my co citizens, my countrymen to think: is it not better to be a VIP in India, anyways and anyhow than to be a normal common man to thrive in a better way? Is not a highly educated and well to do man with maybe fifty-sixty grands salary less secured and less benefited than a so called VIP, in whichever segment maybe, who has a much less qualification, dignity and potential to offer?
Let me share some instances with you which may make the adrenaline run faster in you.
Case1: Go to any temple in any part of the country(no hard feelings regarding temple or mosque or church, I’m just sharing my experiences); there’s a long queue you will find and you will find a fraction of a second to touch the holy Idol after waiting for four to five hours, that to getting pushed like an ill fated sheep in a flock with hundred percent risk of getting stampede. And if the occasion is like Rath yatra or Kumbh mela it’s better you better pray to your almighty beforehand so that you may return home safely.
Case2: Go to any hospital, specifically the government one’s as private hospitals are not meant for common man, you will be made follow a number of steps which will make you feel you are important, but the very next moment the assured thought which will come to you is, ‘Alas! I’m undone’. Considering a normal appointment with a doctor and not an emergency or a surgery, first go and make a card for yourself and WAIT, doctor calls you after two hours as he is the only doctor on floor tackling some fifty patients, then get his consultation and again WAIT, this time some tests are needed to be done. Again an occasion of waiting comes when you are going to get the reports of tests. total waiting time increases exponentially to around seven hours. Then again doctor calls you to give you judgement and ask you to WAIT to make you meet a senior doctor to get his valuable words on your test reports. At this point you will feel that you are a guineapig. And after waiting for some long ten hours you will get a very whole hearted welcome from them; they will ask you to get admitted for better observation and surely no senior doctor will ever come to meet you. After all it’s a business. But had you been a VIP; just go in, get yourself checked and come out, the press will follow you.
Case3: In auto rickshaw, you will feel yourself to be the person with least due respect as anytime the auto rickshaw may ask for any amount for your journey, he may assault you using slang, he may ask you to take another auto rickshaw anytime in the middle of the road, he may drive it as rash as possible and you have to be the silent listener as they have something called union and you don’t.
Continuing likewise many such day to day cases will come up and at the end of the day one will get nothing but FRUSTRATED. So that’s what I was trying to ask, will things go on like this? Are these happening to me, to Ram, to Madhu, to Peter to Azhar and every next door guy and will continue the same way?
With a population of a hundred and twenty crores will the ten to twenty percent VIP’s get all the privileges or better to say avail the rights and rest remain neglected? It’s time to think and get oneself a position where he is privileged, else he will remain in the nowhere zone as the rest if Indians.
by Trina Talukdar on May 13, 2009
We all have our own mental categories about these things…age, time. Till 9 its early morning, 10-11 is late morning, 2-3 afternoon, 4 onwards evening and after 10 it was late night because that had always been my curfew.
It was the same thing with age. Till 6 years was the baby stage, 7-13 was the child, 13-21 the teenager (I know that goes against the whole nomenclature of the word ‘teenager’, but that’s how personal mental categories are, they don’t follow rules of nomenclature). But 22, oh god, now 22 was an adult! All my life I had categorized people above 21 as “dada-didi”, facing the world with a job, ready to get married and have children. And I was now approaching 22 with F1 speed and I spotted no pit-stops.
My most stark realization of growing up, funnily enough, was, not my periods or finishing school or my first boyfriend, but the bizarre realization that I now had to stop calling bus conductors, shop keepers and strangers Kaku, and had to call them Dada instead. And now that I was turning 22 I had to brace myself to be addressed as “Didi”, or maybe even… (shudder)… “Aunty”!
So I guess, this is one of those retrospective points of life. So I got a big mug of coffee and sat looking out the window at the first rains drenching Kolkata’s hottest summer in a decade. A romantic picture. And anyway, that’s how they all did their thinking in the movies. But my coffee finished, it stopped raining, but I hadn’t gotten anywhere with the retrospection. What had I done in these 22 years to be remembered, that was significant? Something that was different today as a result of the 22 years I had spent on this planet? I sifted through every achievement of my life, every item on my resume, every certificate I had, at night when I couldn’t sleep, in the day when the bus wouldn’t move in the traffic, at night as the IPL game crawled along.
Nothing. I wasn’t the world champion or even the state or school champion at any sports. I had never been on T. V. or the radio and obviously not the movies. I had been unable to publish any of my work, in spite of my confident childhood dreams of being a writer. I hadn’t gone to any fancy and famous foreign university. I hadn’t raised $ 500, 000 by the age of 12 for the impoverished around the world, or started an sms campaign to put bowls of water on verandahs to save the lives of birds dying of thirst. In short, if I hadn’t ever been born, it wouldn’t have a made a tiniest bit of difference. And suddenly it was like the 22 years of my life had never been because it had made no difference.
And, oh no, don’t try telling me I’m only 22 and it’s still too early to have made a difference, and that I have my whole life ahead of me to make my life significant, because there have been people a lot younger than me who have done way more. Bilal Rajan is the 12 year old who has raised the $ 500, 000 and is a UN representative to Canada. And he was 4 years old when he sold fruits to raise money for the Gujrat earthquake victims. There’s Robin, who’s been to 52 countries, served the military and managed to finish her masters too, all by 24 years. And there have been child sports and music and art protégées. I might have another 50 years of life left to make significant changes to this world for the better, but that still doesn’t excuse the fact that I have wasted 22 years already. Doing what? Getting good grades in school and college, being a good daughter and making my parents proud, being supportive, funny and therefore popular with friends? Reading, watching movies, listening to music in the name of gathering knowledge so one day I could make a difference. But don’t you see, I have done nothing with that knowledge. All I have done anything for is myself- good grades so I would get a good job and be rich, be a good daughter so my parents would get me new phones and iPods and laptops. I have only taken from everyone, the world, society all these years and have given back nothing.
My mother, quite disturbed by my self-defeating article, tried convincing me that the 22 years were not a waste. That I was apparently preparing myself to make a difference. Well then, I think 22 years is about enough to prepare someone to jump into the world. And I was going to make excuses no longer.