A small Realization…..!!

I had recently gone on an adventure trip with a group of people… mostly everyone unknown (not anymore though)… It involved water rappelling from a waterfall of around 120ft.

This piece of write-up is not to describe my experience in that particular trip (though I will write a little something about the overall experience of that trip, but later).  

Well this site was somewhere near Kasara, Maharashtra. It was in one of the surrounding villages. Its path involved passing through a lot of small lanes…ofcourse off highway. There was an entry gate, similar to the one that a fort has. Surprisingly, most these roads were pucca.

Inside the village there were small huts scattered here and there, cows and bulls grazing everywhere. You have to be extra careful while walking. If not.. you are likely to step on something that is not very exciting… 

There were small paddy - fields of rice.  Not larger than a few square feet. People were working on them trying to sow rice seeds or stems or whatever they are called….

Once our trip was over, we passed a couple of huts in the surrounding area. Infact, we also got a chance to go into one of them…

I don’t know if it was a good experience or a bad one…..

Its raining outside and you see a hut that is made of wood and dried leaves. It has small holes on the roof… an effort has been made to cover them using plastic sheets. The house in unkempt. Not that they can help it. It is barely  sustainable. There is a traditional chulla that is used to cook food with the help of wood. I don’t know how they use wet wood though!

There was a fleet of half-naked kids sitting on the front porch.  The thing that they had in their hands caught my eye. It was lunch hour. The kids had a bowl in hand that was filled with something that looked like baked flour. Not far away, there was another group of kids heeding to the cattle. A little surprise was that a place as small and underdeveloped as this also had a small govt. school.

This site was merely 2-3 kms from the highway, yet it seemed to be so secluded, so alone. So far from our normal lives. Like it belongs to the past century.  Then how would the other lakhs of villages of India be, some of which are not even accessible?

It made me wonder… aren’t we a little too lucky. Looking at the conditions that these kids lived in, our lives were nothing less than walking on rose petals. They had little means of education and no scope for anything of what we call a social life.

Also, what was the possibility of them making any remarkable progress in the future. The place that they lived in provided no means of business. The nearest city or town being in some faraway land. Education that did not go beyond primary. Living was from hand to mouth.

All of us have complains with life. We have problems with our work, our friends and families, neighbours, our social and love life. But we can think of these complexities of life because we do not have to worry about our basics.

What if we had no basics?

What if, instead of worrying about what vegetable or delicacy to cook, a mother had to worry about what to cook?

What if, instead of worrying about buying his daughter a new iphone a father had to worry about his house blowing away in the wind?

What if, instead of worrying about how much will you and I earn, we had to worry about how to earn?

What if, instead of worrying about her first crush and bitching friends a 19 year old girl had to worry about taking care of her own child?

Understanding this doesn’t require a lot of intelligence. All of us want to be someone else’s shoes. But those few shots in the lives of these people makes me realize that how I lucky I am to be wearing my own….!!