A ceremonial feast for wilful defaulters

The story of a blind man

 

Ram Mehar is a robust 77-year-old man. He is visually challenged since birth. A big loss indeed but at the same time he gains a bit, even though it is no compensation, by being spared of the frazzled and faded travesty of the visible life around. He has an almost infallible skill at the rest of his senses minus the sense of seeing.

His main challenge is to stay updated with the changing nooks, corners and bends in the village streets. He has to keep the latest changes in his mind. To recompense him for the loss of light in his eyes, destiny has given him an ability to pronounce Hindi words almost perfectly, which is an oddity among the farmers whose hair-raising linguistic anecdotes give enough proof to the fact that theirs are the tongues especially made for slowly drooling, rumbling, intimidating, abusive sounds in Haryanvi. Chaste Hindi is farthest from the reach of their tongues. Ram Mehar speaks best Hindi in the village.

He has inherited two acres of land in his name. As per local custom and belief, marriage is mandatory to attain moksha after death. They got him a purchased bride when he was sixty or a bit more than that. A well-washed, scraped, brushed and dainty Ram Mehar led the marriage party to the poor girl’s native place in neighboring Uttar Pradesh. It was a rocking milestone in the empyrean torpor of his many decades on earth. Many farmers enjoyed sweets and cheap liquor. It cost him about one lakh rupees, out of which fifty thousand rupees were paid to the bride’s father as purchase money.

Selling girls for marriage in lieu of money is an established profession. The brides usually run away and the agents get them married again to some needy guy. It’s a lucrative business. So the bride-buyers keep a strict vigil lest they run away. People had sympathy for blind Ram Mehar, and hence many eyes kept a watch on her. As a result, she couldn’t run away.

After two months, she being not able to slip away of her own, her wards arrived to call off the marriage. The villagers demanded the money back. ‘What money?’ she snapped. ‘Only if you guys knew how did I manage! A servant would charge at least twenty thousand rupees for two months. For the rest, don’t force me to open my mouth. He is a young rascal “there”!’ she pointed at a part in his body. ‘His night funs won’t come at less than five hundred rupees per night. So that makes it another thirty thousand rupees. That settles it; we don’t owe anything to him.’

That indeed settled it as the villagers got impressed with his power and forgot about the main issue. He lost the money but got some new reputation for being very young and strong ‘there’. In fact, the people bestowed him more respect after that.

अपना फेफड़ा खुद कत्ल करने का सरल उपाय

 जो लोग गाँव में रहते हैं, उनकी धारणा है की वे शहरों की तुलना में अपेक्षाकृत स्वच्छ हवा में रहते है। लेकिन गांवों में भी चीजें बहुत तेजी से बदल रही हैं। गांवों में भी प्रति परिवार डिस्पोजेबल प्लास्टिक की मात्रा बढ़ रही है। किसान अपने घरों से कुछ दूर गोबर के ढेर रखते हैं, जिसका उपयोग वे नई फसल के मौसम की शुरुआत में खेत में खाद के रूप में करते हैं। प्लास्टिक को खेतों में जाने से रोकने के लिए वे हफ्तों तक छोटे-छोटे ढेरों में प्लास्टिक को जलाते रहते हैं। प्लास्टिक के कचरे को खेतों में भौतिक रूप में देखने के बजाय हवा में अदृश्य करने का एक बहुत ही सरल उपाय ढूँढ लिया है गाँव वालों ने। इसलिए मैं दिन में कई बार जहरीली प्लास्टिक के जलने की गंध महसूस कर सकता हूं। उन्हें इस बात का एहसास नहीं है कि वही प्लास्टिक अब दूसरे रूप में उनके फेफड़ों में चला जाता है। वह दिन दूर नहीं जब किसी गांव में बेहतर हवा में सांस लेने का काल्पनिक विचार अपनी प्रासंगिकता खो देगा। जब तक हम अपने प्लास्टिक के निपटान का बेहतर तरीका नहीं खोजेंगे, तब तक गाँव शहरों की तरह प्रदूषित हो जाएंगे। यह उतना ही सरल हो सकता है जितना कि अपने प्लास्टिक कचरे को एक बोरी में इकट्ठा करना और इसे निकटतम शहर के पास गांव के बाहर कूड़ेदान में फेंक देना। लेकिन इतना झंझट कौन उठाए। हमें इन दिनों हर चीज के लिए तुरंत समाधान चाहिए।

A simple way of destroying your own lungs

 

The ones who stay in a village may have a notion about relatively cleaner air than the cities. But things are changing very fast even in the villages. In the villages also the disposable plastic per household is on the increase. The farmers keep dung heaps, not too far from their houses, which they use as farm manure at the beginning of a new crop season. In order to avoid the plastic from going into the fields they keep burning the little heaps over the weeks. A very simplistic solution to turn the plastic rubbish invisible in the air instead of seeing it in physical form in the fields. So I can smell poisonous plastic burning multiple times a day. Little do they realize that the very same plastic now goes into their lungs in another form. The day is not far when the hypothetical solace of breathing better air in a village will lose its relevance. The villages will turn as polluted as the cities unless we find a better way to dispose our plastic. It could be as simple as collecting your plastic garbage in a sack and dump it at the dumpsite outside the village near the nearest town. But who will take that much trouble. We need quick solutions for everything these days.                                           

To kill a mocking sparrow

 

The recent trends in Indian politics are very disturbing. The present government says their goal is Congress-free India. Now can you visualize a democracy without opposition? A political system without effective opposition is as good as autocracy. Let’s try to understand it through a true story about Chinese premier Mao Zedong. The all-powerful leader ordered his subjects to kill sparrows so that they won’t eat grains in the fields and thus there would be more grains for human consumption. The people treated him as a God and on his instructions the entire Chinese human population turned enemies of poor little sparrows. So the sparrows vanished from the Chinese skies. A sparrow-free China it became. But they had forgotten that sparrows don’t eat just grains they eat pests and harmful insects as well. So with the predators gone, the pests and insects reigned supreme and chucked out entire croplands. It resulted in a terrible famine that lasted for three years. Similarly, if opposition, that is Congress, is chucked out of the system, the pests and bugs of predatory tendency to misuse and manipulate power will chuck out our democracy. A healthy opposition is a predator for the bugs and pests of autocracy. The government has to understand that Congress doesn’t merely eat their parliamentary seats, it eats the pests of autocracy as well. The government is legitimate in its efforts to come to power again in 2024 but why shout Congress-muqt Bharat. Say we will defeat Congress. If you openly declare that you want to finish the opposition, it only means you want to run this country as an autocrat.