Imagine waking up in a well-furnished-serviced apartment, don’t think about the lean dark maid in colourless sari, overlooking just-built roads filled up with cars, then after a shower in well-pressed clothes hanging about your clean Scandinavian furniture with a mug of coffee in your hand, planning the day in your head. The carpeted corridor is empty, the lift is decorated with looking mirrors and it’ s just nice with the lift operator in company-issued uniform smiling at you only to reveal his stained teeth, and when he salutes you.
Down in the office where everybody wears serious expression which matches their decent clothes, you exchange trendy jargons. On your desk you have three wide-screen computers planted and below them your smartphones are strewn as though they are disposable sheets; you know one among them costs someone’s , living somewhere, annual income.
The world from this place is always moving and things can be done easily; when you have to deal with a policeman, dial the speed-dial number and tell the excited man your name and designation. This is the country and this world is for real. Indeed, but for how many?
Just get yourself as far as the entrance in the morning, you see the guards behind sandbags, his slender rifle barrel on a bipod, his helmeted head over the butt. New cars have arrived and begun occupying the swept front of the building. It’s just the place which you always wanted to have in your country when you were studying in some western country. Since you have it, you don’t mind flaunting it.
What you don’t see when you have gone to bed are those creatures who creep out in colourless clothes and folded sheets in their arms looking for a place to sleep. And they do sleep in front of the very building where you sleep. Further down from your building their number rises, and you can find them rolling below the street lamps with their wretchedness exposed.
In your kitchen you worry about micro-organic food, they gobble what they get. The new mattress makes your back ache, they roll on grimy concrete. You had to call the pest control office the others because there was a line of ants on your kitchen wall, they sleep with them.
Away from this world where the bourses open in the morning, the judges arrive escorted, shopping malls sprouting , metro trains running through the high-rise buildings, there is a disturbed world where the creatures are rebellious and have not been in bitter term with your government. If you are talking about bills to be passed to make the place more business-friendly, they still have laws which are more inhuman than the colonial laws. Why bother mentioning the colonial eras? It’s hard to make people feel the gravity of a condition in certain place.
Wasn’t it absurd when the Americans went about the world preaching equality when a large section of their population was facing discrimination? Isn’t it ridiculous for India to blabber about human rights and democracy when a chunk of its people are classed as creatures which can be swashed?
What meaning do these successes have? Does materialistic advancement have anything to do with morality? Men fought with pointed weapons in scanty clothes, men slaughtered each other with swords in leather-armours, men, now, kill men in bullet-proofed armours. They killed others to get meat, they invaded and pillaged others for slaves and wealth, now they do that in three-piece-suits. Why wouldn’t you spit? Give a reason.
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