The girl at Andheri station

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Shantanu Dutta

18 April, 2011

It looks like in 60 years plus, we have exchanged some symbols. We have replaced colonialism by chamchagiri and the talisman is now tokenised by the topi.

EVERY SUNDAY morning when in Mumbai, I have my breakfast outside Andheri West station where just opposite the Mcdonald's outlet, a man sells delicious home made upma and some other dishes. He is quite popular and if one is late, he would be wrapping up and going. This morning, I landed there just in time to buy the last serving of his upma. Even as I was standing by munching, a little girl of 10 or 11 came by begging for a serving. The vender opened up his container and showed the girl that it was all over. The girl then begged for some chutney.

The vender was willing enough to give some but the girl had no plate. However looking around for a while, she reached into the trash can where previous customers had deposited their plastic plates and picked up one. She collected the rather watery chutney in a plate , with a lot of spillage on her dirty frock and left. A minute later , she was back , looking for spoons and once again, after groping in the garbage bin, she picked up a few used ones. I realized then to my horror that the girl was not alone – she had her family , possibly siblings and this watery chutney with nothing in it but some heavily diluted coconut paste was to be the family breakfast that morning.

Some images fade away from memory rather quickly, but I think that this one won't any time soon. I had seen the despair on the little girl's look when she peered into the empty upma container and her face glow with delight at the sight of the watery chutney that my scientific mind told had nothing whatsever in terms of nutrients. Even the upma seller, a lower middle class man, selling his wares under the blazing sun and making ends meet, looked in despair that his upma was all over , or he surely would have given some.

I often recall the quote of Mahatma Gandhi which says this “ I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away I wonder where such words have gone and what we have done with them.

I have worked for the NGO sector for close to two decades now and work for a small one now. And we struggle to raise our little budget that we might be able to pay our staff their modest salaries and run programs that makes the world look a little better, a little kinder. And we struggle because fund raising is not in our DNA. Some how talking about asking for money, even to help children and people like that girl at the Andheri station seems difficult; we feel diffident and shy. And then we open up the news papers and find the pages full of the Telgis and the Rajas and the Kalmadis, not just asking for money, but demanding it for favours that they would dole out instead. And it is not that the these people were poor and impoverished. They were fabulously rich already and still they were demanding money crores of it, just to fatten their empire ? Do we people even have a conscience left any more?

It is good to know that Anna Hazare fasted and his fast led to some hoopla and that the government has set up a joint commitee to draft the jan lokpal bill. But some how I feel that the last vestige of Gandhi's symbolism is Anna Hazare sporting his Gandhi topi. The political power establishment has long buried Gandhi's talisman and is busy courting FICCI and CII and calculates life by GDPs and GNPs alone. A prominent news magazine went so far as to call us the chamcha of a particular country.