Skip to main content

Parallel worlds

It was few minutes to the year 2007. I was all alone at my seat waiting for the train packed with all kinds of people to move. Meanwhile I was all set to welcome the New Year with a copy of business world and a packet of Lays. Then from somewhere came this small kid of hardly 5 -6 years asking for something to eat. Usually indifferent to them, I gave him few pieces of the chips which otherwise would have had been converted to fats shortly. The train moved, and I continued to read about the who‘s who of the corporate world. But the picture of the kid begging couldn’t leave me. It kept crossing my mind again and again. How different is their world from that of ours. In fact we cannot probably stretch our imagination to exactly know what their world is like.

What may seem too trivial to us might be something of tremendous joy to these people. For us a piece of bread may be just another thing, but for them it might be life for one more day. We may, at times take survival for granted, but for them it is a constant battle. And how many of them might be here? Over a quarter of India’s population is believed to be below poverty line. How many of them would be actually begging for their livelihood and how many of them would actually have been accounted in the official statistics? And their life and lifestyle will definitely be poles apart from that of ours. Recently I read somewhere “Every fourth person around me is officially poor - and I don't know any of them. In contrast, every twenty-fifth Indian around me uses the Web. I know plenty of those Indians. Why am I so detached from an entire one-fourth of my country?” I am sure; this ‘detached’ population would be much higher than one fourth.

With a totally different context consider the top corporate honchos, which are often ensconced in heir ivory towers. What for them is trivial might be very important to us. Similarly we all have heard of some underworld elements, but what we actually hear or read may just be the tip of the iceberg. Maybe they might be much more, and again with their worlds diametrically opposite. So may be the whole parallel worlds of likes of prostitution ‘business’, or a small time drug peddler, or a sadhu whose life maybe limited to a small village in the Himalayas, or a low level servant in some remote corner of country, where he may not be begging for a living but he still doesn’t find enough means to get 2 square meals a day. For him, the outside world is often totally irrelevant. To a lesser extent it can be also true for the caste system, which is so prevalent in our country, but what one set of people know about other set might be just a very minuscule part. And to lesser extent we have the student world, the banias, executives, movie superstars, a daily wage earner etc. who all have different worlds, though similarities may still exist. An investment baker moving around in his Rolls Royce might be totally unaware of the life of a beggar in tattered clothes, living a life ... no ... merely existing in some non-descript corner of a small town in Bihar, who in turn might be unawre of the life of a 'terrorist' and what goes within his brains, who in turn might be totally unaware of a lower caste farm labourer in a village in Orissa; and it goes on and on.

The point I am trying to make through incoherent ramblings above is that there are so many different types of people in this world, that their worlds are totally different. The overlaps between these worlds though present, may be quite minuscule, and what we know about that different world altogether may just be tip of the iceberg. Maybe, the expanse and depth of ‘their’ world is much bigger than what we can imagine. The glass through which they look at the world is often gifferent from that of ours. Maybe following quote by Rudyard Kipling can capture this difference better.

“East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”

Comments

Shop @ Amazon

Popular posts from this blog

We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented

(Disclaimer: I am NOT justifying any action or behavior. I am just speculating why people usually act so) _________________________________________________________ “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented” – The Truman Show (a 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey) The above line explains a great deal about why we hold on to some beliefs as gospel truths, and form our judgment about things and act in a specific pattern. This movie (which I feel is still quite under-rated!) had Jim Carrey, a person whose entire life had been a live, non-stop, unedited television show. He lived in a world which was completely artificial; everything, everyone knew that everything were fake. But the person was real. His emotions were real. He was conditioned to a certain realities of world, and believed in it. The makers of the show did not want to show him what the ‘actual’ world was. He was made not to want to explore the outside world, made to fear things that could have led him ...

Da Vinci code : The movie

Yet another weekend comes Yet another weekend is about to be squandered doing nothing ... But this time, I managed to watch a movie, the much awaited 'da vinci code'. Was quite disappointed when the controversies surrounding it managed to postpone the release of the movie by about a week. But this weekend, I managed to watch it - adding to the list of very few Hollywood movies I have seen. Having read the book, I was more excited to see the movie, and with Tom Hanks, The excitement was even more. So there I was, seated at a not-so-good-yet-expensive multiplex. I am making an assumption that most of the people who are watching the movie would have read the book. I may be wrong. Maybe, many of us old be tempted to believe the 'facts(???)' stated in the movie(in fact the book), we usually love what is spicy, especially if it is said with such conviction as in the book, where the demarcation between the 'fact' and 'fiction' are not exactly distinguishable. D...

Law of increasing competition !

"The first step of reaching the top is getting through the crowd at the bottom" How often we think to cross one level of competition, and be assured that rest of the going would be smooth, just to realize that competion has just increased ! As a child we often didn't know what we are headed for. Later on we make a decision, usually the one that would lead to something more comfortable later in life, or colloquially "do this, then there is fultoo aish". As a child I used to think that if I get good grades in school, life would be comfortable. Maybe comfortable meant "bed of roses" to me. In engineering, all the old school style of competition seemed somewhat trivial ! Bt still there is a big fight to get those coveted jobs, but again, on reaching "there", we often end up realizing that just to be ahead of the crowd, you have to compete a lot. During those job/graduation days it is a dream to get into any of the coveted b schools leading to a w...

Games Students play

It is not about sports like soccer, cricket or TT; nor about some indoor games like chess or computer games. How often we hear words which on surface convey a simple meaning but deep inside the meaning may be totally different ?!. It is about these ‘games’. Formally defined, games are a form of ulterior transaction, and which leads to a definite payoff. Ulterior transaction is the one, which on surface may appear to be completely normal and without any hidden “trick”, but at psychological level it may mean something totally different. For example it may appear as if an adult is talking to an adult (adult – adult transaction), but at psychological level the ‘adult’ speaker may be talking to a child (adult-child transaction). (No more technical jargons from now onwards!) How often we hear the phrase “In US it isn’t so; actually there it is …” At the surface it may seem like a mature adult talking to another, stating plain facts. But at other level it is telling that “I have been to USA”....

All in the name of journalism

The paparazzi seems to goes frenzy over any thing pertaining to the rich and the famous, and more so if they happen to be a cinema star. Just the other day I was browsing through a website which described Brad Pitt and Anjelina Jolie’s Indian trip. They even had the detailed description of their local train journey in Mumbai and Pune trip. Now I know that they had an auto-rickshaw ride in Pune They visited the Gateway of India Anjelina had a local train ride (in second class compartment) from Charni Road to Churchgate. And she was wearing a T- shirt and a cargo pant. And she even brought train tickets (now beat that!). She bought some peanuts and mentos at Marine lines station. This is one of the sample news items, but such type of news galore like an actor planning to quit smoking since years, or someone having an hour of daily workout, or the diet of an actress and blah blah. Just take the example of the times of India and with all the kind of chatpata, masa...