Remember Swades...

I am listening to 'Swades' track "Yeh vo bandan hai jo kabhi toot nahisakta". The scenes from the movie go auto playing in my mind. Powerful the song must be for the emotions it evokes. I remember, while I was working in a call centre, I was talking to the only girl in our batch. We were talking about the movie. She said the movie touched her. I had said that it touched me too, though the actress of the movie (Gayatri) had a more profound effect on me, she simply stole my heart. She smiled. I then happened to ask her what exactly in the movie touched her the most. She vividly described a scene when Mohan bhargava (apna SRK - playing 'An Indian NASA scientist') is travelling from one Indian village to another in a train and how a young boy is running on the platform of railway station to sell water in a kullad for 25p. I distinctly remember Mohan was visibly perturbed by the fact that this could well be the means of livelihood of some brethren of his own race. I mean here livelihood of a person who is as human as he is and therefore pointing to the stark contrast in levels of existence.

Then, probably inspired by 'Mind of Strategist by Kenichi Omahe' which I happened to be reading at the same time I was listening to the song, I starting analysing and realised that perhaps is no investment in this business activity but it requires great deal of labour. It would have involved gathering mud, make it amenable to being casted intokullad, then giving shape to kullad on a rotating wheel and finally filling water and making the sales effort. Now, taking into consideration the settings shown in the movie (which were quite life like), a rough estimate of the money he would be able to make would be at max 4 rupees. These 4 rupees should be able to buy a village person enough wheat to just manage survival of a family for a day. In a non agriculture season sustaining livelihood by this means may well be an ingenious idea. Though, I am not too sure of that. To think of that more realistically that was the way one family was surviving at least in the movie.

This brings to light the evolution of man kind from a prehistoric to a modern man. Needless to say, both survived fine. What is different is the survival needs, what is a need for one is beyond luxuries for the other. A modern man (put yourself in his place) can't think of living without soap and a shampoo. A normal human if we go back some centuries didn't even knew about these things. To quote a specific instance of what I am talking about, I recount a incident that stuck me while I was working with Infosys (a software giant) in puneIndia. We (4 people sharing an apartment) were invited to a societydusshera function after which we were served dinner. However, there were no spoons. People were accustomed to eating with hand. Even my other flatmates managed somehow, but I born an brought up in a spoon using family (pun intended) could not eat and therefore I had to waste chawal. This might sound funny which it is but something similar can happen to anybody and therefore, the incident demands observation and contemplation.

This incident made me believe that we have complicated ourselves where where we could have been living very simply. If we consider a normal human being life cycle, a person is born, he studies, he works, he grows old and eventually he dies. On an organism level it is immaterial whether there was a technological advancement on the planet or not, it is also immaterial if the organism was able to understand the cosmos and the diseases plaguing it. Sometimes, I also began to think of the futility of what we are all striving for in this world of cut throat competition. To put it bluntly, one is simply going to die and it would be immaterial what one made of oneself after he/she ceases to exist. And it doesn't require a particular spiritual bent of mind to figure this out. That is also the reason I sometimes feel 'I am flowing with the river' like most others. Mind has so been constricted by the society that it only can think between and not beyond. I wish and hope sincerely that there is a more reasonable explanation.