The Rotten Apple:

I didn’t want to start this year’s first post on such a note, but for the past few months it’s been screaming in my head. Not that I can do anything about it. Many have tried and many are still trying but it seems like a quagmire….you keep slipping into its murky depths.

Our country, the proverbial rotten apple! All gloss and shiny to the outside world, but slowly eaten by worms inside. No, it’s not a reaction to what’s being highlighted in the papers….which is just a tip of the massive iceberg of rot. It’s what I have seen, known that often makes me feel desperate. Forget how all the politicians are digging to their elbows into the wealth pie (they own everything from taxi-fleets, hotel chains, cinema halls, dailies, sugar factories, agricultural land to hill stations etc) or the land mafia who are grabbing land left, right and centre, building houses and selling them as your dream house, or businessmen who are digging up the earth in eco-sensitive zones or pumping back effluents in groundwater to avoid detection. I am talking about everybody else, all of us who given a chance would do exactly what all these politicians and businessmen are doing. Like the women traveling in first class who carefully wrap up the farsan packets and throw them out the window, like the mother who loves the serial Balika Badhu but wants her 15 years old daughter to get married next year, or the Rajput guy who works in an NGO for women’s empowerment but asks his wife to keep ghunghat, or the MNC executive who gets angry at land sharks and environmental degradation but will still buy a second house at the very hill the land shark razed in the first place.

It has become a part of our bloodstream…..the innate inability to think correctly about something or somebody else other than the self.

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I went to a few villages in Maharashtra and talked to farmers and their families. Out of sheer curiosity, I asked the first family I met, about their plans for the future and their kids. The father said he wants his children to get educated so that they can go to town and earn good money and not live the hard life of a farmer. Though my colleagues agreed with him, I almost smirked at him.

Every family I met later gave me similar answers….children should get educated to become doctors, officers and live in towns, build houses etc. My colleagues were getting irritated with me for asking such an inane question and I was getting increasingly agitated to hear the same answer.

Then we met the last family. I had to ask them the same question. The father said that he wanted his children to finish school and then send them to college for agricultural studies, so that they can come back and work better on land. The mother said that it’s the land which has given them everything and that their children should know the same.

I smiled. There is still some hope left somewhere.