Street vendors roaming the village alleys on business have real competition, a real business acumen propelling them in an almost fruitless task day in and day out. But they take their work very seriously. They mean it.
For the exactly recurring, like an audio tape played repeatedly, signature calls to attention for their products and services at hand give a clue to their pinpointed focus on the job. These are very poignant calls to attention, sneaking forcefully into the nonchalant ears, creating ripples in bucolic hearts. And as they do it repeatedly across seasons, in the same streets, for years, for the same business, their siren call becomes a periodical, legitimized, branded, copyrighted piece of hawking to attention—their very own typical tones.
There is a subziwala. We call him "leeeyoo." After shouting out the list of vegetable items in his wooden crate at the back of his bicycle, he sums up with a nice, long-drawn, affable, "Leeeyoo!" It is a dialectical variant of lo, le lo—take it.
He's a short man, this "leeeyoo," most of the time clad in his faded purplish kurta-pyjama, and sometimes it is the grey one. This chubby, round-faced keeper of a genuine smile and gentle manners has his fixed list of clientele, just as others of the trade have theirs.
The other one with the trademark hawking notes is the juicewala—mosambi juice—from Bihar, roaming the street with the citrus-green fruits piled around the hand-operated juicer on the hand-pushed rickshaw trolley.
His siren call consists of a pitchy, high-octaved, crisp, "Juice peeoo!" So he is the affable 'peeeoo' to most of the villagers.
He too has a fixed list of regulars: the elderly and the sick.
The kabariwala is a young fellow with plenty of enthusiastic twists of his mouth and tongue to sound out the title of his scavenging deeds in a pitchy, pointy, rich-octave voice. "Ee kabbaaddi vaalle" he preens always meaning to clean the houses of their junk. He is the simple 'kabadi' to the villagers.
Presently, the darling hawker of the ladies in the village is the suitwala, the seller of hundred-rupee-a-piece female clothing.
He shouts, "Sau, sau ke suit le lo!"
Here, sau is the number, the numerical hundred. "Sau, sau ke suit le lo" means have a pair of clothes enough to make a suit and salwar for just a hundred rupees.
He has devised a musical cadence to suit the softer, purchase-lorn souls in the ladies' hearts. His richly varied, highly coloured and printed collection of cheap, hundred-rupee pieces attracts a lot of gathering around him.
Among the other notables is the picklewala. "Aachaarr!" he trills spicley.
Another is the kabz churanwala—the constipation churan seller.
And then there is the jaggery puffed-ricewala. It is puffed rice sweetened with jaggery.
So these are the notables. All named by the villagers on the basis of their main hawking notes.
And what I have observed is that the unskilled people of the Indian motherland are the ones who are at the front of the battle for survival because they don't have either the capital to start a business or any specific skills to go into a job or start some venture.
The poor people just imitate each other in making a living. Mostly, they just pass the day wandering around, trying to convince themselves that they are doing something lucrative.
So you have dozens of vegetable sellers, dozens of other hawkers and vendors. They can just look towards somebody of their level and start doing the same.
And there being so many of them, almost similar in the skills and situations of life, it's a very tough competition for them.
*****
The day has a title. It is October 2nd, and the famous title is Gandhi Jayanti.
The thickly underlined day—it has the heavy burden of the great man's non-violent legacy. On each day of the rest of the year, it has to struggle against all-pervading antonyms, which have now become the mundane fundamentals, pushing, pulling and prodding (and testing) the Father of the Nation's long-winded tale of aesthetics, principles and morality.
But then, on his birthday, the Mahatma's legacy is artfully felicitated.
After all, it is a national holiday.
Thus, the forever holiday-seeking Indians, the children especially, salute the beneficent Bapuji for bestowing them with a day off work for the elders and a holiday for the children in school. They celebrate it as a holiday, as a festival, as a shastra-boosting myth.
We celebrate, we pay a dithering, fleeting homage, we devote, we glorify the man, we vilify him as well.
But each second takes him and what he stood for away and away from us—a fuzzy, grainy, hazy figure vanishing into the mists of the past; a figure on the path of myth and legends, which will further take him away to the path of godhood in the distant future. And equally distant from humanity on the ground where things will be done exactly opposite to what he meant to do.
The God of disobeying children who will worship him for being a virtual impossibility—Einstein's forecasting homage, by the way.
His legacy will turn ineffective, his works misinterpreted, his deeds misjudged, shut down in sanctified, glorified volumes to be picked up and thrust to the head for a fraction of a second's reverence, just like people do with the holy scriptures in the courts before starting to pour out white lies.
The emerging messiahs of the Dalits denigrate him, and so do the other neo-Ambedkarites. Muslims can't forgive him for being the ringleader of the anti-Muslim League axis, a virtual anathema to the idea of Pakistan. Hindus hate him for being a Muslim from inside. "Why did he allow so many Muslims to remain back here in India?" is the common poor little Hindu's observation.
These are ever-ebullient minor and major revolts against his constitutional status as the Father of the Nation.
The new emerging nationalistic forces want him dislodged from the lofty throne. The only saving grace is the common man's honest conscience that still sees the blood on the shirt of the patriotic zealots.
Misunderstandings about this saint of Sabarmati far, far exceed the glory of his image.
He acted symbolically. The meaning of his actions and ideologies percolated deep, deep into the spirit, beyond the narrow confines of poor letters and words only.
But we, the fuzzy heads with our crippled senses, can't see beyond the barbed reality of mere letters—the concrete, single-minded, one-dimensional, straight-faced reality.
So almost ninety percent of what the Mahatma actually stood for misses our heads because it is in the spirit. It needs nuanced, subtle sensitivities to feel those soft undercurrents of the great man's philosophy.
Thus, we waddle in just ten percent of his letters and farce away and joke and make him a lampoon in the form of a naked clown whose goat ate grapes, as if the poor beast was the real cause of India's impoverishment. And who, in his old age, walked aided on both sides by young maidens, as if the old sanyasi's tale of sexuality was more important than two wrinkled fatherly hands on the shoulders of two daughters.
We Indians are the too small, puny, crippled children of the mighty father. All of us cannot shoulder the spirited mountain of his myth and legacy.
So, led and driven by our practical instincts, we dismantle the mammoth aura to trim it down to our shoulderable size so that we can carry it.
We are the masons, always working, hammering down the big blocks to carry our own tiny, feather-weighted, pusillanimous, able to be trifled with pieces of his mountainous legacy—or we will further drag and break them down to make pebbles and play like kids playing marbles.
Pebbles to be kicked at by the erring brutish footballers.
Pebbles to be hurled through slingshots.
Pebbles to be thrown into the mud.
We, the worshippers of his glory, our feet in the sanctum sanctorum, our arms, meanwhile, busy in creating the paper birds of the present who die, pulped down the moment they come across the first rain.
*****
The common man's refrain is that Gandhi's ideas were bigger than his deeds. The latter appearing puny, pint-sized, beggarly, cowardly to the present generation, bursting like a balloon with the fussing and fuming gas for power, status, money and advancement, victories and triumphs.
This is a generation of new knights in shining armours, the belligerent commanders of the consumerist field, where everybody wants to lead the columns, with none contented to be the humble, honest foot soldier; all lacerating their capacities to outdo the fellow battle-worshippers.
It is a parricidal, fratricidal field, a modern battlefield. Blood and gore of selfishness, individuality, shortcuts, infidelity—and they have encircled the great man's sanctity at statue-bearing squares, which still somehow commands the rule of traffic through his checking, harking philosophy. But the day is too short for obeying rules, and the night is always enough for flouting them.
Decent work of many sunny, normal, legal days gets undone in a single dark hour.
So the naked fakir finds himself, stick in his hand—but it was a support, not a weapon—encircled in a noisy, clattering, white-blooded invisibility. A gory mass of apathy. His frail figure, draped in the cotton armour, appears dozing, the puddles of his life's very antitheses spattered around like homages and offerings at his nimble, poorly, lightly sandalled feet.
So October 2, the holiday, has come and gone, garlanded hurriedly by white-blood-smeared. The great man still has many bhakts. But they are poor, voiceless, almost naked, and they hide behind the curb around his statues. They are scared for being off-beat: non-violent species in a violent world.
Many of his former pupils and disciples turned belligerent commanders. Khadi, in shining armour—Khadi commanders they are—with their homespun new convictions of survival in a belligerent world of angry politics. But they still elaborate on the vestry around the poor Godfather, whose persona could be amply defined in a few pencil strokes on a blank white sheet of paper. Such simplicity.
They now, to add colour and excitement to their role of great pedigree keepers, fill it with brilliant hues to stake higher claims on account of being sired by a great, blemishless soul.
There are glittering columns of obituaries to historic figures, from individuals, from organizations, from parties, from government, from media persons, newspapers dated October 2, where the presence of the light sage's—light-robed and light-staffed—quick march, like a miracle worker, his soul seems to dawn on printed pages, on tongues.
But the miracle-performing soul seems outdone. For those who help perpetuate a legacy, what else is a miracle? They have outgrown the patriarch's shoes. They don't fit well. They just wear them uneasily, grimacingly, for a short, brisk, unpaying, unrewarding walk as a ritual, a ceremonial ritual on Gandhi Jayanti.
All said and done.
Still there is a huge silver lining—optimistic, inspiring, almost life-giving, drawing one out from the gut of desperation.
The morning today has been blessed by the pen of a man who normally blesses with willow. Sachin Tendulkar has written his first-ever signed piece exclusively for the Hindustan Times.
It is a long, inspiring, illuminating chain of words from the man, laid out systematically, iconically, like he plans, prepares and executes the scheme for every single run.
In this write-up, the maestro coolly, calculatedly, honestly, candidly dispels many a veil from around his mythicized persona to emerge an Indian first and foremost, an exceptional human being, writing down his glittering destiny from the pen of his own ink and nib—a family man, a friend, a philosopher and a guide, with his scriptural trail of dreams, hopes, efforts, strategies, competition, achievements.
Reading the write-up, I realize if one has to excel in any field at such levels, the brain has to imitate a smart, fast, ultramodern computer, and your heart at the same time has to be spacious and fragrant enough to embosom the whole splendiferous essence of the most beautiful vales in the world.
And I am proud that our cricketing god is just like this. No shame in idolizing him; he deserves it absolutely.
October 4, by the way, is the birthday of my friend Pardeep, born just a couple of days after the Mahatma.
He surely justifies the Mahatma's non-violent legacy. The guy is calm, caring, affable and absolutely incapable of any type of violence. So we still have tiny Gandhis here in India. But they are poor and suffering. Weakness, poverty and deprivation appear so close to the image of the Mahatma in the present times. So close that any talks of nationalistic strength has to treat him as a redundancy, an unfitting element in the equation.
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