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”