Recounting the events of an evening not long ago.
Today was one of those days. A day when things happen. And make your life a little more meaningful. But also a day that makes you question your life.
Saw Deepa Bhatia’s film, ‘Nero’s Guests’. The film itself is not spectacular but its protagonist most certainly is. The film follows P Sainath, a man who has devoted his life to a study of India’s rural affairs, and most notably its recent agrarian crisis. And Sainath is an angry man. Not hard to see why, for the last few years he has been following the trail of suicides in the cotton belt of India, a symptom, he says of the larger agrarian crisis of ‘corporatisation of Indian agriculture.’ It can’t be easy to be faced with the despair and helplessness in those thousands of faces, knowing that there’s little he can do to help them. God knows it was difficult enough to see the film without a lump in the throat.
He is also a good speaker, a fallout one assumes of the many talks he gives regularly. His knowledge of the subject is commendable, and his arguments forceful. I have read Sainath before, even some of the one-liners that he used in the film and later while interacting with the audience. (I guess in this country one ends up being repetitive in order to simply be heard.) He always comes across as well researched, and today was no exception. The pleasant surprise was to see his impressive personality and aura. Though maybe it should not have been.
The film was well made. It was a film about the agrarian crisis as seen through its protagonist’s eyes, and delivered on that front. It is high on emotional content, often resorting to emotion to drive home a point, sometimes to anger, sometimes sarcasm, and at other times to poetry and story telling. It’s the kind of approach I have often found in Arundhati Roy’s non fiction writings. It makes for very interesting reading, in this case viewing, but you come away wondering if you haven’t also been somewhat emotionally manipulated. Be that as it may, it is nevertheless an important film for the message it holds, which is urgent and yet much neglected.
I came back home to see a crowd at the corner of Ahimsa Marg, where our building stands. This street corner has been witness to much action over the last few days because of the attempts of the residents of the corner building to remove a vegetable vendor who sits on the footpath. He’s been around for awhile, as long as we have been. I never knew there was a problem with his location in the first place, after all he is just selling vegetables, like many other illegal hawkers and vendors in the city… how could he pose a problem to anyone? Besides, how do the residents of a building have any right over the footpath outside, even if it is the one adjoining their boundary wall? That is after all public property. A couple of days back when we headed towards the vendor to get some vegetables, we saw his entire lot strewn over the road, and a large crowd gathered around, with some of the ones in the centre looking rather self important. Even then I had wondered if the goons of some political outfit such as the Sena or the MNS were involved. That’s the one thing that makes us Indians brave. Connections. Backing by local rogue elements.
Sure enough today when I was on my way back from the film, I saw a small board with a picture of Raj Thackery and notice about illegal hawkers at the corner. There was also a row of stone seats installed around the corner, in place of the vegetable vendor, and the dosa and pani puri stalls that existed earlier. There was a crowd again, and upon enquiry I realized that there had been some sort of physical fight, and the police was expected to arrest the vendors.
The vendors?
I can’t help but wonder at our apathy. We want all the conveniences that the underbelly of the city provides us, such as our drivers and our domestic helps, and free home delivery of vegetables and groceries from the local kirana shop, but we’d rather not see them if possible. We believe in beautification drives. We’d rather have a row of stone seats at a corner of an intersection full of traffic, than a bunch of people trying to earn a livelihood. Where do they go, you ask? Well, that’s the government’s lookout, isn’t it?
Another story that the only one I’ve seen sitting on one of those seats ever since they have been installed, is the security guard ‘protecting’ them.
Got home finally. And found this touching
photo essay, (link shared by a talented photographer friend, Zishaan Latif http://www.zishaanlatif.com)
Life suddenly seems beautiful in more ways than we find the time to appreciate.
