Someone Knows the Reason

Sometimes I cannot understand some things. I know you think it is most of the times. But the problem is that those of you who say so are most of the times ignorant of the fact that it is you who are incapable of doing so, as far as my state of mind is concerned. I will cite some examples. Someone said to me yesterday about her liking for some piece of work, that I did not like somehow. I simply remarked that I knew the reason why. And surprisingly I got a NO back. What the heck? How do you know what did I think? If I say I thought you have a decent level of affection within you for the author, what would you say? Or simply, If I say you like anything that you do not understand, would the answer still be a NO? Perhaps, I should have said that you like those because you tend to locate yourself within the plot so to say, or may be you see the author grossly involved in the plot, writing something that he connects, even if remotely, to you. I think I knew why you liked it because it is very apparent from the writing that it is not new, and not very exotic as such. Tell me why do people in Bengal still flock to Mithun flicks, or Sunny Deol flicks grab considerable eyeballs still in Northern India? How can someone justify people still having fantasies with some typical south indian action film? I do not understand.

So, the reply I got was a very weird one. She said that every such tale brought tears in her eyes, and that the writing was so realistic. Oh my God! I had an unintentional smile on my face. There are two kinds of sweet people. Ones who are actually sweet and the others who are stupid enough to be labeled sweet. I myself have been in the second category few times, but I was freed of all doubts regarding the other person. The only difference was that the adjective should not have been sweet but naive. 

The pity with the world is that most of us find comfort only when we see some mishap having direct or indirect forbearance on our lives. And most of us enjoy this. I do. I like people coming up to me and condoling with me in times of distress. And for that matter, I do not want to come out of it, or present myself as someone who is very carefree, regardless of the fact that he is troubled by a lot many other issues. On the contrary, I find pleasure in forming my own issues and drifting around with that grief stricken and that very not-smiling, serious face of mine. Attention grabbing techniques? Certainly one of those. At this point, I ask for some digression, since attention grabbing techniques have been mentioned. The other day when the professor asked the girl about her notes, I was waving mine. The reaction was simpler. "Vivek, are you trying to send some feelers to her, as if you want her to share notes with you". "I wish I could have succeeded, Ma'am". Smiles all around. I have better techniques I guess.

So, I was talking about some things that I do not understand. I was traveling the other day in the train from Delhi to Guwahati. I saw this slum area near the Guwahati station. The train abruptly stopped outside the station. The area was full of trash, I mean both the people and the surroundings. Trash and people you might say is very radical on my part. Yeah, it is, but I doubt you would have had second thoughts had you witnessed what I did. The setting is not one that typically fits the slum area. This was not anything different but it had a strange atmosphere looming large over the roofs of the huts that were built. The sanitation was at level zero, because I could see people actually using the paths they use to walk for toilets, the drains were nothing but a very shallow channel provided to drain away any water that crept into the locality from the nearby drain, and the broken sewer pipe, to the other half of the same drain. It was disgusting. The place was likely to be a dumping ground for the human waste from all around the city, and the huts were built over the mounds of the waste. The "roads" leading into the area and further into the huts were the ones where the pigs bred. I am not writing anything other that what I actually saw.

The broken telephone booth served as a perfect irony in that weird landscape, a piece of happening and touching photography for one of the fellow travelers. I was appalled. Not only at the sight, but also at the attitude of the fellow traveler. All this this while complaining about the locality and its inhuman condition, he was abusing the people as well, calling them all sorts of weird names, Bangladeshis being one of them. What surprised me was that he blamed the inhabitants for all that was there, overlooking the rehabilitation problems they might have been facing when they shifted here. After all no one sleeps on human waste and a mound of rubbish, beside a dog and a couple of pigs, out of choice.

I am no humanitarian or some activist who aims at pointing out the fact that the government has ignored these people, leave alone doing something. I will write just that I saw. And I hope this evokes as much pity and sympathy as some monotonous, banal piece of fiction does,if not more, and gets instrumental in having people shed a tear or two at the plight of the ones who are not fortunate as we are.

Amidst all this jargon, a sudden violent drama unfolds. The train is still halted, waiting for proper signals may be, or perchance the driver needed some recreation and refused to go any further without it. The event might as well have provided him one. The small man, I thought he was a Nepali, comes shouting out of a shack, with a stick in his hand. He was a short fellow, sturdy, but i thought he could have done well with a little more clothes and some more hair on his head. So, he has this stick, log I dare call it, in his raised hand, and following him come out a pair of boys, small,very small. He starts lashing out at them. They are helpless. The neighbors all come together, not for the help of the boys, but as spectators. And as I would have expected them to form a group at the site and do nothing, they did not. After a moment or two, only the man and the boys were in the picture, again. The man still shaking with anger, shouting abuses at both the children and at his shack. The children wailing, swollen after the treatment. I thought he might have been drunken. And that it might have been a routine for him and the children, the boys.

Someone said it was not a routine work. He might have been disturbed by the daily income troubles, and was frustrated. The other person commented on his wife's unfaithfulness, confidently stating that he understood what the man was rumbling all the time. I do not know. I was stuck on the apathy of the people. Apathy in the sense of total ignorance. They all of a sudden became oblivious of their surroundings, what was happening around them, the man, the boys, the exercise, the train, the thundering sound of the clouds...everything. They did not stop at anything. The Nepali went off with his stick somewhere into the trash. The local boys came around with their football, and started playing. The football hit one of the boys who had taken the beating, and he forgot about everything else. He got up to play. Everything had changed in a while. A woman, disheveled hair, dusky complexion rendered dirty somehow, wiping tears, and trying to cover herself uncomfortably in that sari of hers, comes out of that  shack, goes straight to the boys, hits them hard, pulls them by their ears and drags them back into the hut. The game continues, without the feeling of any interruption. The boys begin their crying again.

The passengers find amusement at this.  Someone clicks at, and records, the sight of the woman's naked breast that kept popping out of the insufficient clothing she had. Some other, sophisticated passengers find this place fitting to dump out all the waste they managed to have collected through out the journey. Some football fans simply wonder at the finesse with which the street boys were playing. Amongst the few others, a couple goes out into the hill and begins asking the locals something in the native language. I was simply staring out of the window, cursing the driver to have stopped at a filthy place like this, with filth all around, and filthy people all around.

And now when the person says about the connection she established with the characters in that imaginary writing, I think about the futility of human life. (Errr.....where am I leading towards....). We relate more to things that we fancy we were a part of rather than being able to put ourselves into the positions of reality. Why do we empathize at the tragedies of some imaginary creations when we have all the misery in the world to be a part of, to be a spectator to, and to be a cause of as well.  Why do we find pleasure to imagine ordeals when we have live accounts of such, imprinted on the canvas that we behold every moment? I know not.

This is simply one of the things that I do not understand.