The Road to Prosperity: Wheels, Rockets and the People Left Behind

October, 2005

The district road looping around our village has always been busy. Earlier, it was busier with noise than with the rhymes of smooth traffic. It was famished for two decades and cried for tar, like a thirsty dying man pining for a drop of water in a desert. It was terribly pockmarked, and the chassis, bodies and windscreens of trucks, tractors, as well as two- and three-wheelers, rattled over it.

It was a noisy, jingling affair, like a long serpentine toy, one of those jingling ones which the kids enjoy so much. The vehicles plied over it almost cursingly.

But the commencement of this new century has brought a smooth, less corrupted, less adulterated layer for the road. Advancement and fast speed demand a smooth asphalt layer on roads everywhere in India.

There has been a boom in the automobile industry: cars, cars, more cars for the upwardly mobile, then motorcycles for the lower middle classes, then mopeds for the lower classes.

The road is now busier than ever in negotiating the frictions: the dangerous propensity of rubbing shoulders between the lesser privileged and the more privileged, between cars and motorcycles, between man on foot and the hurtling metal machines.

The road now carries an added vindictive, progress-bound, revengeful, competitive air of adding more wheels under the bottoms of progress-aspiring people; adding more and more wheels to become the centipedes of the fast track, the beaters, the victorious, the triumphant czars of the new century.

The lower-middle-class couple riding on a bike, the compatible wife holding the child in one hand and the other holding the bulging belly of her husband, along with bags and packets of shopping, and the load of immense expectations and desires, goes with dangerous speed and risky nearness to accident through the spaces between big cars and trucks.

The small cars cast enviously angry looks at the big cars. The motorcycles stare at the Marutis. The Marutis give jealous daggers to the Hondas.

It is a breakneck pace. Boosted by jealousies and complexes. 

All hurtling at a furious pace to reach some unsparing life in the concrete jungle.

But this contrast between the haves and have-nots is mounting with the propensity of unsustainability. There are numerous ant-like labourers, road workers, beggars and peddlers along these serpentine paths of our progress.

It is a dangerous proposition indeed.

While the paddy, grown to full height, shows signs of yellowing around the lower end, and grains in the crowns have rice in their womb, the dangerous proximity of rising ambitions of the latter aspiring combatants goes hooting, hurtling, buzzing with blazing horns along the road, across the fields, and in cities too—in Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, Faridabad.

Hopes and prosperities are rocketing up with sheer vertical force.

The rocket fuel shoots up a tiny, minuscule section along with their luxurious apartments, mega malls, multiplexes, cars, computers and aircraft into the higher orbits.

The launch pad, however, is surrounded by a barren, bemoaning field crowded with masses craving for even the basic faculties of life.

The launch pad's platform is but a tiny dot on this vast, horizontally spread-out sea of deprivation—slums, rats and rodents, labour, poverty, crime, prostitution, beggary, butchery—a sea of gloom around the tiny lighthouse of prosperity.

Shadows of the shining minarets cast crosses of suffering, compromise and helplessness over the shadowy, grassy network of the teeming majority.

They look high into the man-made sun, heaven, stars, galaxies. They come in between their eyes and the real moon, which is still higher.

Crammed under this man-made cosmic world, they have lower gods, lower heavens—not needing hell, for it is around them already.

They love it for being so near, with its glitter and sheen, enough nearness to make them jumping monkeys trying to touch some finger to the bright adornments hanging down from the rich ceiling.

They hate it as well, like tiny live rogues in a sizzling hot pan.

For this inverse gravitational force makes them just helpless, puny tools, see-sawing between the earthly and manly gravitation.

Rates of property have boomed through the ceiling.

The real-estate business—the rocket—with each scheduled or unscheduled launch, makes countless souls almost crawl out of their skins to stick to it. If not able to get a seat inside, then at least to stick to some nut or bolt on the hot, shiny exterior.

Still beyond, in the famished hinterlands of states like Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Andhra and Odisha, the Naxalites are having potshots from too far a distance, too far for their medieval muskets, at the spacecraft of capitalism. It is like throwing darts of mud at a massive stone—ineffective.

The ideology seems almost craziness, a futility which will result in death only. They don't seem to have any future to me. Futile exercise. 

The people of the high-five class—I mean those who have climbed several profit-making rungs on the corporate ladder and thus are entitled to fill up the Page Three sheets in newspapers with their bloated, tiny world of ultra-modern gossip, fashion, house decorations, holidaying, sex and alcohol—these are exquisite people who have now started to name their younger ones after the names and characters from India's scriptural past.

The aerial view from the pedestal of their achievement is increasing in scope. In letter only, missing the spirit. They cling to ground through a few museum-kind old names, which glitter with their mythological sheen. It arouses many visions in the eyes of art curators and antique dealers.

So the great and glorified trail -- an entire tomeful of the scriptures, epics and mythological mystics -- is cut, trimmed and packaged in the form of a word to shoot the glittery, glorious future of the rich kid.

The greatness, obstructed, cut and preened to be put in an encasement, is presented to a soft, mushy life. Cut from its glorious chapter, the word is fitted into the ultra-modern chapter of a kid's book, where the only reason for its not being lost is that it is outlandish in the linguistic field where English, the mighty warrior, calls all the shots.

We have Vedanta, Harsha, Yudhishthir, Yashaswi, Dushyant, Sanskriti, etc., etc.—the names, the title heads to whole bale-fulls of mysticals of the past.

If somebody says, “What is in a name?” then he has a chance of being in the line of some indiscretion, because such names are the pallbearers of a whole era, a whole tome, a whole mythological milieu.

Stuffed inside the whole mass lies the attractive word, now living as the rich title of some innocently spoilt life.

Well, the days now have acquired a deliciously cool tinge in this late autumn. In mid-October, all the monsoonal wetness, summer's furies, winter's cold clasp, spring's helpless urge and desire—all appear to be lulled into a sort of unheeded dreaminess in which time certainly flies without any drags, if not disturbed by our seasonless breakers—that is, human intrigues and wars, ranging from the streets to the worldly stage.