The
years between 2010 and 2016 cover my career in publishing in Delhi NCR. I
worked in a few companies ranging from online B2B marketing, content development
for web portals, digital publishing, and hardcore academic publishing.
The
jobs were thoroughly engaging, requiring your submergence into the sea of words
with total focus, and at the end of the day you would feel like you had been
doing hardcore labour, just like unskilled workers in the manufacturing sector
do. And on top of that was this feeling of not getting enough payment, a kind
of undercurrent of being underpaid for all this hard work.
It
was tiring and exhaustive work, full of underachievers because, of course, in
editorial and content development work, these were people who had some talent,
who had academic inclinations, but unfortunately could not achieve in life what
they really deserved, and at the end of the journey they had to take up this
job.
I
don't think I came across anybody who was here by choice. It was by compulsion.
It was just by circumstantial forces pushing one into a corner and then having
to take up this job when there was no other option.
Salary,
of course, was always an issue. It was not as per my expectations, and
especially after all those lofty aspirations and nearly coming to touch the
civil services, and then having tasted business, and even though at the end of
it I had to quit business, still I had seen, I had felt what it was like being
an owner of an establishment, however small it was.
I
had seen money arriving, money going, and the nice lifestyle in between,
international travel, seeing the world, and other luxurious things. So having
to convince myself to take up a content writer or editorial job in academic
publishing houses was almost a milestone.
I
accepted my fate and melted into the ignominy of congested, crowded, jostling,
teeming, unkempt, labyrinthine, suffocating, mushrooming, disheveled Delhi.
Being lost in this claustrophobia being as good as finding oneself in silence
and solitude in the infinite space among the crowd.
My
major stay during these six or seven years was at Aligaon near Badarpur Border
in Delhi. A rural settlement caught in the restless entrails of the concrete
octopus spreading its tentacles but not able to digest it completely. The smell of struggle in the streets, the sweat
and fatigue of labour, the diehard stubbornness of hope and dreams, and the
soft, quiet, unassuming dignity of people struggling against enormous odds.
Here you had thousands of struggles within meters. Dreams here were plentiful,
sadly space wasn’t.
It
was an urban village off the road to Faridabad and Mathura, cutting across the
congested stretch from Ashram to Badarpur Border. On the right side you had
this manufacturing corridor in Okhla Industrial Area. On the left side you had
Sarita Vihar, and just nearby was this urban village growing very weirdly,
unshapely, being pushed from all corners by the urban forces. Here poverty was
the landlord; necessity its poor tenant. Everybody seemed to be moving; few in
reality were progressing.
Under
unplanned forces, it was just like any other urban village, as you can imagine,
people trying to cope with the rising economic opportunities and then just
rushing into the first major thing that comes to them, that is, making rooms to
accommodate more and more people as tenants. The tenants had to be busy, busy
and busy to make ends meet; nobody had the luxury of standing still. The city
promised mountains but delivered molehills; but hope was the cheapest item that
could always be bought even with empty pockets. Life was cheap; but survival
was very costly.
This
area was a cheap locality because on one side you had Okhla Industrial Area and
Mohan Cooperative industrial zone. Then you had the Badarpur and Faridabad
industrial corridor, and across the Yamuna to the east, of course, it was
Noida. It was thronged by unskilled migrants labors, hawkers and vendors carrying
inherited struggles on their frail shoulders; but at least hope would take
birth every day in morning after dying by the end of the day.
Here
poor migrant unskilled labourers from UP, Bihar and MP were staying, paying low
rent for one-room or two-room accommodations. Here in this tiny rural corner
with a mountainous urban grafting. A stubborn village although swallowed by the
urban leviathan, but not completely digested and hence puked out in a strange
half-digested rural-urban hybrid -- weird, shapeless illegitimate child of
unplanned urban development. The streets slept very lightly; while hunger
hardly ever slept. Full of crowded lives with almost empty futures.
To
me personally, it was even peaceful to be lost in this concrete wilderness, to
be wandering unnoticed while caught in the sprawling tentacles of this
heartless urbanization. In the suffocating embrace of urbanization -- a
labyrinth of brick, mortar and human strife, struggle and desperation (but
dreams also) – it was strange type of peace. Here in this haphazard anatomy of
the urban village, in a forgotten crowded pocket, where this untidy untended
creeper clung to the big metropolitan banyan tree, I also rented a little nest.
While the city exploded like uncontrollable organism around, I willingly became
a participant-cum-observer of this claustrophobic geography of survival and
needs. There was dignity in this drudgery. There was discipline in this
desperation. When tomorrow is mortgaged to today’s needs, survival itself turns
a full-time occupation. And there is art in it. Aesthetics.
Staying
here would save me a lot of money because just for two and a half thousand
rupees I had a reasonably good room in comparison to the majority of the people
who were staying in almost slum-like conditions at 800 rupees or 1,000 rupees
per room.
As
they say, a one-eyed man is a king in a group of blind people. The same was the
case with me. I was surrounded by people whose labour the metropolis was aware
of but wasn’t aware of their names and presence. It needed their hands, but
wasn’t interested in even casting a single cursory look at their faces. Every
tiny hovel-like room had an unfinished story. To me nobody was insignificant in
their struggle. It was a big university without classrooms to learn lessons in
life. I studied their curriculum, they busy in trying to pass the exam of
survival. I saved money here, but I collected rich experiences also.
The
entire street where this house, whose one room I had taken on rent, was
situated was full of unskilled labourers, security guards, petty shop
attendants and vendors, street hawkers, or engaged in any type of job that can
be sandwiched between the urban toast to squeeze out a morsel of survival and
living. Quite a busy and happening place.
Poverty
has its great tightening grip on its carriers, and there is a sort of communal
living where many struggling poor people are staying engaged in different types
of jobs.
It
was more or less like a village kind of environment, people speaking in
Bhojpuri and Purvanchali dialects, addressing each other like they were from
the same village.
It
was a very happening, busy, noisy street clamouring with the pangs of survival,
the economic survival of unskilled migrants arriving here in the urban jungle
with dreams and aspirations to look for a relatively better way of life, but
getting lost in the urban sea as unknown entities. The fast wheels of economic
growth, development and progress plied over them like they were a layer of tar
or asphalt.
The
central thoroughfare with ceaseless caravans of economic refugees arriving like
human tributaries emptying into the metropolitan river. These uprooted children
of impoverished hinterlands jumping from deprivation to uncertainty, sometimes
calamity; their entire possessions tied in a few rag-tag bundles; the unsung
and unknown foot soldiers of our economic development. They land on the
platforms, day after day, year after year, jumping into uncertain destinies.
The restless migration of unmeetable dreams; the flight from inherited
deprivation to uncertain opportunities. The small-human tide washing against
prosperous shores. The exodus of these refugees from the circumstantial tyranny
makes them look like economic pilgrims moving towards the shrine of the goddess
of prosperity. And when these invisible passengers of our train of growth land
here, ogling at the distant lighthouse to these dispossessed, it's a leap from
familiar poverty to unfamiliar struggle. Ironically, it feels like a massive
migration starting from fringes and ending on margins. A herd, almost in tandem
with herds of cattle and sheep moving almost hypnotized: carrying the
accumulated arrears of historical injustice; shackled by the inherited chains
of inherited deprivation; a life starting several miles behind the starting
line; squashed and pulped by the crushing arithmetic of daily survival; haunted
by the perpetual deficit of existence; burdened under the ancestral baggage of
discrimination and exclusion; struggling to come out of the bottomless pit of
everyday necessities after spending a lifetime in the pit over the generations;
busy in the merciless mathematics of hunger; balanced on the knife-edge;
chalking their endless plans for survival; a life lived on the narrow ledge between
life and death just a step from each other,
It
was not a long street. It was a mere side street. It ran for just a hundred meters
approximately starting from the main street. The house was situated at the end
of it. About hundred meters of compressed humanity: a microcosm of our
unfinished social transformation; a little republic of socio-economically
dispossessed; a miniature struggle of survival; the cramped theatre of everyday
survival; the living museum of everyday existence; the buzzing beehive of human
necessity; a human anthill of restless activity.
It
was a little street with hundreds of twisted tales, unfinished and bleak. It
was a cauldron of conflicted dreams at the congested crossroads of destinies perpetually
getting baked under fire. In this mosaic of deprivation and determination,
there was the orchestra of labour, laughter and quarrels. A tiny republic on
the crowded island of humanity where citizenship meant to be ever-a-soldier in
the miniature battlefield. Here the unending carnival of unending needs and
necessity played out day and night. A little universe held together by the
undying will to survive.
There
was a dead end, and beyond that was the single railway line for cargo trains
that fetched coal to Badarpur Thermal Power Station, which belched smoke into
the already smoked-out lungs of Delhi. Along the line there was semi-wilderness
comprising bushes, grass and trees on both sides of the single line.
Just
in front of the house where I had taken a room on rent, there was this
rectangular, double-storeyed block of a tailoring unit. They were vendors of
some local clothing manufacturers. There were rows and rows of sewing machine
operators toiling away day in and day out, their salary being defined by the
number of pieces they finished in a day. Just near it was a water treatment
plant where they drew water with a borewell, treated it and sold it in 20-litre
bottles. The rest of the street was occupied by families in bundles: big
families, small children, school-going children, adolescent parents; all
struggling from the youngest to the eldest.
You
could see the handcarts of the people who would put either their small-time
eatables, snacks, tea, or vegetables, or trinkets and toys on them and wander
around the congested Aligaon to seek out a few rupees that would convince them
that this life was economically more paying and better than their villages in
UP, Bihar and MP, where there were no opportunities. The wage payments back home
were very low, and on top of that, you had annual floods that would destroy
their crops on their little plots of land.
Most
of these poor unskilled migrants belonged to the so-called lower rungs of
society, poor people, socially disadvantaged, from the so-called lower castes,
always at a disadvantage, underprivileged, and beginning their journey from a
huge account deficit, where even reaching zero and starting afresh required
almost an entire life's worth of effort. But still, whatever might be the
living conditions in urban villages, people get drawn to them, just like people
from Third World countries are getting drawn to developed countries, even if it
means perishing on donkey routes and illegal migrant routes, drowning in the
sea, getting shot by guards, being duped and kidnapped by mediators on the way.
That is the same old story of people running away from their miseries. So it
was a little replica of this tendency of humans migrating to better places.
These
were too small people to venture out for any bigger places. So they had landed
here in Delhi.
On a
daily basis, full trains of migrant unskilled labourers from Bihar, UP, Madhya
Pradesh and other northern states arrive at Delhi platforms. You have small,
dark, famished, undernourished, malnourished, historically deprived,
underprivileged thousands walking with their sackcloths and gunny bags full of
utensils and clothes bunched together and made into bundles, carrying them on
their heads and shoulders and backs. Little women, I call them girl mothers,
clad in soiled saris, carrying infants in their arms, and a few others toiling
along with the struggling parents.
A very
poor sight.
Staying
among these people, it would always remind me that it's a privilege to have a
skilled job, even if it was in content writing in B2B ventures, or digital
publishing, or academic publishing. It would give an appearance of being a good
and nicely paying job.
The
house where I stayed was a two-storeyed house at the end of the small street,
in front of that tailoring unit. The lower floor was occupied by Chhedi Lal, a
man in his early fifties, small, stocky, funnily mustached.
He
plied his handcart called thela and
tried to sell his chole bhature or parathas, which his always-fighting wife
would prepare early in the morning for him so that he could sell them, serving
as a lunch provider for scores of unskilled migrants and labourers in the near
vicinity.
They
were from Bihar, from the cobbler community, historically deprived, socially
very, very underprivileged and exploited. People like them have been running
away from the dragnet of historical exploitation by the higher castes. They
hardly have any opportunities: no land, no education, no social standing. So
here they are trying to re-fabricate and reshape a new identity, at least for
the children. The woman was very energetic but quarrelsome though, and that can
be understood. Managing the economy on a shoestring budget, where you have to
dig a well every day to drink that day's worth of water, is wearisome and very
tough. And she was giving her best. She was restless, but I never found her to
be lazy in any way. Her husband, in contrast, was a cool guy; a silent pond in
comparison to the gurgling, noisy stream that his wife was. So he would absorb
all her grumblings, shoutings, taunts, comments. Most of the time he was silent
and just did his job, and when he was at home he just lay down. He did not
bother about the hurricane unleashed by his wife.
Their
pairing was like a placid pond by a turbulent waterfall; almost a quiet bank of
a perpetually overflowing river. If he was a man of still waters, she was a
woman of restless currents. Her words would unleash like monsoon torrents, he
would quietly absorb them like dry land. I could usually hear this domestic
cyclone fussing around the unmoving centre. It was a treat to watch such
differing temperaments yoked into the same cart of survival. As she cooked food,
the steam from pressure cooker looked like her anger escaping. Chhedi Lal
surely had amazing endurance. Maybe her restlessness fuelled the household and
his composure steadied it. While reading after coming from office I could hear
the daily thunderstorms going late into the night. I really respected Chhedi
Lal for his patience against this endless friction born of poverty that
cascaded from the mouth of his wife. The grinding wheel of survival is bound to
give sparks. Good that he never raised his sails while her storms lasted.
Otherwise the house would have blown off.
It
was sheer luck that I never ever found him raising his voice. So we owed our
stay at the house to his endless patience.
The
ground floor, where they stayed, had two almost semi-dark rooms. The entry was
through a small door leading to a little, always-wet corridor, on the right
side of which you had their bathroom, toilet and kitchen, and as you passed it,
in front you had their living quarters, and in between there was the staircase
leading to the first floor where I had my room. Their bathroom, toilet,
kitchen, almost always busy, always noisy, somebody shouting, somebody raising
complaints, almost hara-kiri. It was buzzing with that struggle for survival,
always on tenterhooks. It was always shaking, and I can never ever recall the
small cemented, brick-paved flooring being dry. It was always wet.
They
had four children. The eldest was a dark, slightly overweight girl, must have
been around 17 or 18. She was followed by another girl, 13 or 14, a slim girl,
dark in colour but with very pretty features. The girls were followed by two boys.
The
family was doing its best by sending their kids to a government school nearby,
and as you can understand, the education system in state-managed schools is
very poor. So it was education in name only, but still they were moving towards
getting matriculation or senior secondary certificates. So even if Chhedi Lal
probably never went to school, and neither did his wife, if their kids reached
up to senior secondary level, that would be counted as moving up the rungs, and
possibly the generation after, their grandchildren would move on to achieve
graduation certificates with real skills to get into some job, some skilled
job. Such fights in such families are intergenerational after all.
Children
the tender shoots trying to break through the concrete of inherited poverty.
Soft, slow steps on the slow staircase of generational uplift. Each school
certificate a breach in the fort of deprivation and dispossession. A windowless
existence so far, now education opening a tiny hole to the outside world. The
tiny participants in the long relay race of social mobility. It's almost like
Chhedi Lal and his wife running the first lap, followed by his children and
then his grandchildren, to be finished in the coming generation. Or say, the
parents planting a sapling whose shade and fruits would be enjoyed by their grandchildren.
I watched their first uncertain steps out of the historical gutter. Their eyes
glittering like tiny lamps flickering against the darkness of deprivation. A
schoolbag carrying the unmet dreams of many generations. Walking on the fragile
bridge between inherited poverty and imagined prosperity. This generation
adding one more rung to the ladder, to make the ladder long enough to allow
them to crawl out of the painful basement, and go on a slow painful ascent up the
ladder to come onto taste open air from the subterranean existence. And go on
roof and look at the distant horizon of a university degree. Vaah, the stubborn
green shoots of possibility; dreams germinating in the cracks of deprivation.
We
should not expect too much and expect them to create miracles, and we should
never judge them, because they start their life from gutters, and to come out
of a gutter, from the worms of survival, and clean oneself and start walking on
the main street, and then go on to the highway of economic upliftment, is no
mean task. It requires generations of effort, and they are doing that.
The
eldest girl probably was in the loops of adolescent love, because I would
always see her sneaking up to the terrace on the roof of my room, going past
like a young filly, phone clasped in her hand and a gleam in her eyes. The other
girl of 13 or 14 was very silent, and I almost always found her silent in a
very dignified way. She carried herself with a lot of maturity even at that
young age.
Sometimes,
after office hours, when I stood on the terrace looking at the silence of
bushes and trees along the railway line, the Badarpur Thermal Power Station
railway line passing behind the house, and another abandoned house just
overlooking the other side, it gave a very quaint feeling, a strange feeling of
not being exactly in a metropolis, but in a very weirdly shaped village where
so many types of stress, tensions, aspirations and dreams had commingled to
form a heady concoction.
Therefore,
it was quite interesting: looking at this last green fringe of the suffocating,
smog-laden metropolis, with thermal power belching smoke nearby. Sometimes when
I took a peg or two of whiskey the railway line looked like a scar across the
urban wilderness from the terrace; a scarred iron artery feeding Delhi's
industrial appetite.
At
nights, the room would shake with the rhythm of coal trains carrying black
nourishment to the smoke-belching giant, the thermal power station. And the
smoky lungs of the tired metropolis would try even more to keep jogging, for
progress and growth.
The
forlorn patch of greenery at the edge of industrialization presenting a kind of
uneasy handshake between wilderness and factories. But past midnight, when
there was no train on the track, it gave the feeling of a thin line of silence.
I would look into this abandoned yard of metropolitan battlefield. A thin slice
of dying wilderness in my backyard surrounded by the soot-stained horizons.
Here I sometimes heard the last whispers of rural solitude very late in the
night. And to make it very ironical, it was so close to the thermal giant
belching smoke.
The
staircase landing on our floor lay in the middle of the two rooms on this floor.
On one side there was my room, and on the other side was the gem of an
attraction for this entire little house. It was full of new, fresh dreams, and
it would require a complete separate chapter in its narration.
These
were rectangular rooms. My room was a measuring about 20 feet by 10. Its roof
was made in the typical rural, mundane, modest housing style, of stone slabs
and iron beams. The other room in front of me, facing the street, in front of
the tailoring unit, bore the same proportions with just one addition. It had a
little kitchen, a very small kitchen where, at the most, two persons could
stand shoulder to shoulder and try to work out the cooking. And in between,
where the staircase landed from the ground floor, there was the washing area
with a tap, and just where the staircase landed, there was a common bathroom and
attached latrine, very small ones. A little bathroom where a heavy person would
have difficulty in giving a free hand to massaging and rubbing his body during
bathing. And from this bathroom, there was a little, tiny room leading into the
Indian toilet on a raised platform. These two things, toilet and bathroom, and
the washing area with a tap, were shared by the occupants of these two rooms
facing each other. That was the setup where I was staying, like a one-eyed
prince among the blind.
I
was seen to be earning quite well, staying in a better room. And indeed it was
so, because the room in front always had five to six occupants. Can you believe
it? Five or six of them staying at the same time, sharing the meager monthly
rent.
The
average age of the entire group would come out to be 2O at the most. Like some
of them would be under 20, some of them would be a couple of years more than
20, most of them undergraduates from poor, socially deprived families in UP and
Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Bengal and other states. Most of them held senior
secondary school certificates and were doing graduation through open learning
courses and distance learning courses here in Delhi, with dreams in their eyes.
Their families were not able to continue their studies back at home. They were
doing jobs in call centres. Call centres, the dream world of any job aspirant
who lands up in Delhi NCR. And one or two of them would continue getting
shifted, like someone going out and being replaced by someone else. But four or
five of them were always the permanent fixture, and that made it very, very
interesting.
Five,
six, even more when they had visitors folded in a single room, a kind of
dormitory of unfinished dreams. When it was having visitors apart from the
regular residents, it gave the feeling of crowded nursery of ambitions. But
more than that it was a small fraternity of economic survival. They were
hardworking decent boys with dreams bigger than the room that they stayed in.
The young shoulders, restless apprentices of urban prosperity, seemed to carry
ancient family burdens. It kept the floor buzzing with life after the boring repetitive
editorial work. The experience was everyday fresh in proximity of this roomful
of tomorrow's possibilities. There was a solid faith in life fuelling this
apparently fragile fraternity of shared hardship. I witnessed this generation
trying to approach the threshold of opportunity, their dreams traveling faster
their salaries. Five or six different destinies sharing a roof forming a tinier
republic within the little republic in the poor street of a poor locality. Some
of them even read at nigh and seemed the midnight scholars of economic
necessity; the scholar borrowing time from sleep to buy a better future.
]A
crowded launching pad to take their families ahead.
They
called me Big B. Not that I was too big in stature, just that I was elder to
them and was in a dream job, the way they saw it. Because they would laugh that
you earn as much single-handedly as all of us do in a month, and that fetched
me a lot of respect from them.
These
were boys from very disciplined, cultured families where elders had given them
the family values of respecting elders. So I fetched a lot of respect from
them, and that made it quite bearable, watching people struggle, five or six of
them earning only as much as I was doing in a month, and a few of them even
still teenagers, already supporting their families, bearing all their costs in
Delhi, paying for their open studies, and still managing to send a bit of money
back home.
Staying
there almost a part of their group, it made life worth it. After shedding
invisible sweat of intellectual labour while working on the assembly line of
words in the factory of sentences and paragraphs, it was a relief in that
personal environment. I felt almost like a labourer in the vineyards of words.
Those who have worked in editorial departments must be aware of the mental treadmill
of editorial deadlines; the ceaseless churning of the editorial mill; the quiet
drudgery of cerebral labor; a miner digging through manuscripts; a regular
excavation of meaning from mounds and heaps of words. While the unending
conveyor belt kept on fetching more and more raw, full of errors manuscripts. Sometimes
it would appear like a sea of words with no shore in sight. And I would come
back carrying a mysterious fatigue born of earning a living using just mind
with hardly any other physicality involved. Still, it was disburdening to be
away from the spotlight in my village. I was lowest of the low here in this
locality and it gave me a strange relief.
The
entrepreneurial wings had been chipped, so now it was restless little bird
trying to adjust to a smaller cage; a journey from steering my own boat to
someone else's. From the pinching peak of ambition, it was coming down to the
plateau or low land of accommodation, thereupon I wandered with a peaceful
sense of resignation. The office was a tight pipeline so the once free current
hardly had any avenue to feel the vastness of ambition, success and goal. The
dignity that would be bruised earlier was now customized to the level of all
those around me.
I
could have easily afforded a nice accommodation in a nice society, but I
preferred to stay here. I felt like a wearied long distance traveller now
safely cocooned in this urban cubicle. My wandering spirit seemed strangely
domesticated. I was fastly adjusting to the truce between aspirations and
necessity. From open seas to this narrow canal. Ambitions thrown away. Personal
freedom ditched. Still in this narrow confine, there was a sense of a different
type of freedom, on this hard pavement of survival, in this reconciliation with
the below-ordinary. I seemed to glow even more with the subdued embers of my civil
services and entrepreneurial fire.
