A protesting march in Febbruary

 This is the third week of February. And here arrives the first windy day with a clear call of the summers. But I prefer to view it as spring. The spring is a brief flowering pause in the north Indian plains. The soil that was clumped tight, as if shivering under the cold elements, is awake now and yawns as dry leaves and dust sashay around as the harbingers of the upcoming summers. Hundreds of Asha workers are marching as a protest demonstration to the mini secretariat, the seat of district administration. They are clad in the colors of revolution—red. The flag is also red with sickle and hammer. They have a long-pending demand for regularization of service and better pay. The march is under the banner of a labor union called CITU. Capitalism has but gone too far for the lurching cart of socialism to catch up with. The sensibility of making money is very steadfast.

Protests like this are just a tardy effort to keep the ideology alive; a kind of consoler march. The ideology is structured too loftily to fit in the sundry world of mundane desires, profiteering and moneymaking. It seems like a funeral march of the penitents whose dream has been marred by the ideological theoreticians themselves. They dreamt too wittily and it turned into a parody. The intent to revolutionize being too eloquent; a semi-parodic act from the beginning, something as futile as marching with its own head on a pike.

They move gallantly, almost with militarist strains. But the seed of the ideology is indefensibly impractical. A contrariety that appropriates the basic needs to a dream within the dreams for a utopian state. A vainly verbose effort at leveling the crop to the same level where each stem is fighting for the sunlight to reach the highest height. The people laugh at the irksome, unsightly speed-bump on the expressway of economic progress. The administration hardly bothers about this type of gathering. But they are highly effective in blocking the narrow, congested road as they file past the bazaar.

Most of them are very poor women from the lowest rung of society. They have bemoaning souls. They hold their manifesto, hoping it will create ripples in the corridors of administration. But there is an air of disempowering atrophy around. They understand that their demands are already discarded, there being no impetus for the state machinery to inculcate their demands. Their cause is no pretty-faced mistress to impress the political lust of the politicians.