Darkness Glorified
Slumdog Millionaire wins 8 Oscars. Arvind Adiga wins The Man Booker Prize. Amartya Sen had won the Nobel and I can go on with numerous examples of “feeding on the poor”. Here you might want to correct me by saying... we feed the poor, don’t feed on them. But Ladies and Gentlemen, I am talking of feeding ‘on’ the poor, feeding on the poverty that surrounds us, feeding on the flesh and blood and getting vibrant with our creative juices, intellectual juices overflowing us. Now why I write it out? Everyone knows, we the privileged, those who always had two, sorry four whole meals to eat, look at those who couldn’t manage one decently, with such pity, such despair and feel so very above them...that we feel the world needs to know about the cruelties of life when we ourselves are big hypocrites walking the red carpet. Now hypocrisy has been part of human nature always... and how I hate it. And that’s why I express my insolence this way. That’s the way the world has always been, divided into two at the least... world of the rich and that of the poor, Light and Darkness in Adiga’s words. And the Rich have always despised the poor yet always needed them. We studied in school about of an ideal State where there would be no class divide and everyone will be one, at par. But excuse me Mr. Socialistic thinker, even you can’t digest that...your servant eating at the same table as you, seated next to you. So we should just let go of this hypocrisy that we want no poverty. We only fuel it. We the rich, make every attempt to sustain it. Our world needs it. We show some money, which I can very well spend on a trouser or spend even double that amount on my shoes, to that women from the little slum, and want her to work as a housemaid for a month!!! Yes, we even justify it. And they accept it also. And when they stop accepting, we complain about scarcity of domestic helps. Yes we all are facing this scarcity accept a few who are still blessed with few from the darkness still trapped in the Chicken coup. I wonder if the fellow, who sold me this pirated version of the Booker winner for just about 150/-, one who knows that it’s a winner of the Booker, some big award given to some writers, one who spells Arvind Adiga correctly, does he know what is written inside, ‘coz there is a character like him in those pages who knows books by covers and he is one from the Darkness and a possible White Tiger. And I just pray Adiga doesn’t get famous among them! We don’t want such White Tigers roaming amongst us.
The White Tiger has been a good read; Slumdog Millionaire was a great movie, both very moving depictions of the struggles of the poor, the underprivileged. Applause to the creators of such “compelling” and “excoriating pieces of work”. Grand Applause indeed! If the creative mass doesn’t bridge the distance between reality and fiction, doesn’t bring forth the darkness forward so that everyone in Light can have a good look at it, and pity and even congratulate the destitute to have made big out there, and acknowledge that these characters are also people who feel, then who will. That’s all we do, applause, pity and acknowledge as if, if we didn’t, those slum people, those destitute will be any less human. I marvel at our thought process, people who always had everything that was needed and most cases what they wanted. We’ll ask God why is there so much poverty, so much pain, so much suffering, yet we feed it, spoon by spoon. We Indians at least won’t take it if our construction workers, daily wage earners charged us anything beyond a 100/- a day. Whereas in US of A, workers are paid more, the divide seems to be lesser. I congratulate them for that. But then their society has always been different from ours and the difference will always exist. There have always existed the KShatriyas and the Shudras, and they always will, in this land of 36000005(eh?) Gods. That’s the need of this society, probably this world.
We are all born with destinies... some of us destined to be born rich and die rich, rich in a very materialistic sense I am talking, and some of us destined for the other extreme, a life of scum. Mostly we don’t change our destinies dramatically, we follow the written pattern and sometimes we do, for better or worse. We all know many rags-to-riches stories; glorified enough to stimulate the brain cells of many a wannabe rags-to-riches future scripts. And there have been the negative carves also, sons dooming their father’s empires, nose-diving into oblivion. They don’t make much of an inspiring read, so we just ignore such stories. So it’s just part of the economy to be rich or poor. There can’t be a midway. That’s why we have the poverty line. See? We already have a scheme so that we don’t have to get rid of poverty, ever.
All am saying here is that, we should not aim for eradicating poverty (a promise every politician makes, hollow as ever and meaningless too), rather work towards making the life of the poor a little more human, and cleaner. Not just for their sake but for all (the rich-minded selfishness creeping in again) so that diseases rising from unhygienic conditions decline and the overall health index increases. We have healthier people, hence healthier minds, lesser crime and we can extrapolate the ripple effects but I don’t want to elaborate now. You can figure yourself out what will be the positive effects of a healthier nation. That is one point I want to make and another is that I am wondering why such grim tales that show such fantastic turn of events get the kudos. Why has the junta taken to making heroes out of such characters? Why is everyone so obsessed with the poor? I don’t think they themselves think so much about their own fate. Everyone sympathises with the poor lad and appreciation overflows when he breaks out of his chicken coup but aren’t the rich guy who also has his personal struggles and emerges out from them a winner equally worthy of such applause? His only crime being that he was not born a poor. I feel people are more obsessed with the silver lining behind the dark clouds than the sun itself. Why not appreciate a through and through sunny spring morning. Why not make the most of it than surrounding ourselves with gloom and then looking for a silver lining. And as much as I might hate feeding on the poor, even I ended up gobbling, digesting and excreting this savoury popular dish. Happy eating!
©Manashi Pathak
