349: Roti, Kapda Aur NEtwork

Roti, Kapda aur Network

Poverty is such a funny word – particularly when it is not tragic. 

Lack of food is hideous manifestation of poverty – then of course there are cases when the doctor advises restraint in what you eat. I know of not eating as a conscious choice to rid of all the stores of adipose painstakingly hoarded over years. The burgers and the samosas are very loyal – they remain lodged resolutely long after they are gone. This kind of adopted and admonished poverty is then a style statement to be brought out for display and bragging – on how little you eat these days. I know of my younger days when an uncle would announce that he could have a 100 golgappas/rosgullas in a go and we would hear the story in awe, as if he had just announced winning Shaurya Chakra. Now he lives life on boiled grams and sugarfree. 

Poverty of clothes is a tricky one. It is difficult to ascertain the difference between lack of means and as a means of style. Torn is the new stitched!! 

I remember many years ago on a trip to the famed lucknow chicken clothes market (why are they called chicken for god’s sake) the shop owner explained an intimate embroidery as ‘turpai’ to me, a craft that once belonged to the gods and emperors, but which can be accessed by the proletariat now, of course at an extravagant and a salary sapping price. The forward march of sartorial progress has taken us from the intricate ‘turpai’ to the elegant ‘torn’. I am told that the next big thing on such matters is the transmutation of the ‘torn’ into ‘tatters’. Watch out and give the devil his due when its time comes, because I shall be most eager to remind you all, ‘I said it first and here’!

On a very different line I wonder if inveterate vegetarians have any issues wearing chicken embroidery. Would then there be some potential of a startup called gobi Manchurian embroidery, if not through the year, at least during Navratras!

Then there is poverty of not so serious kinds. The poverty of thought, of intellect, of being the prisoner of either too much logic or too little of it, of not being able to see the hues of nuances together and only see things in violent binaries, of not being able to sift facts from fiction, of not being blinded by either too much facts or moved by too much fiction. Such poverty seems to be quite forgivable these days.

How can i forget the poverty of not having a sense for the softer things in life, like the written word, the soft tune, of admiring the rising sun, of awe in watching the flowing river, of the full moon, of the crushing waves, of being incapable of being moved to tears just watching the sun set and stars twinkle, and the sheer incapability to be overwhelmed by your own smallness on a dark night watching the starry skies. Such poverty is quite understandable – may be it is not poverty, its just a minor handicap.

Ah, the reason why suddenly the word poverty has stuck to me really is my epiphany about a very vital resource of our times – much critical nourisher than food and much more vital as the protector of vanities than clothes.

Those with it are true kings and those without are true paupers, for they look at those with it with a envy only a truly hungry knows. Even a second without it looks like eternity and it drills a hole in the soul so big that not all the worlds food and all the worlds clothes and jewellery can fill it. Only that which is the source of the misery shall alleviate it. Its presence is riches of the world and its absence is the life of a pauper; there is no point of owning all the worlds’ fortunes, if you do not possess this. Those who have it feel like they control the universe, they know the reasons why the earth moves and the night falls, of why trains run and the aircrafts fly, of how and when movies play and the eateries cook, of why the traffic moves and stops. This resource puts the world on your tips and makes you feel like someone who knows his/her destiny and how to propel it forward and only those who do not possess it, even for a brief moment know this feeling, when I say that the whirling motion of the earth, and along with it the whirling motion of our own lives seems to come to a halt without it. It’s called Network. The one on the mobile, preferably 4G.

Roti, Kapda aur Network!!