The
article ‘Between black and white...!’
appeared in The Hans India, Hyderabad
on October 26, 2011.
To
those who are familiar with the ways of working class women in the north
coastal Andhra districts, it is no surprise to see them carrying their cash,
notes and coins in a small cloth bag tucked into the sari at the waist. The
small bag that can be closed with a draw string, tucked into the waist is safer
than a man’s pocket. Also to those familiar with the area it is no surprise to
see cigars smoked with the burning end held in the mouth. Perhaps the nicotine
intake provides the necessary physiological relaxation from back-breaking
manual labour under a blazing sun but nobody could ever explain how the weird
habit of smoking with the burning end in the mouth came about. Both men and
women indulge in this rather bizarre habit that is cause for statistically
significant incidence of oral cancer in the region.
However
I was pleasantly surprised to see a woman take out a mobile phone and a battery
charger from her receptacle at the waist and seek a socket to plug it in. She
was the maistree for women manual labour. She has on
call a number of women workers. They assist masons in construction work by
carrying in bricks and cement mortar and carrying out debris in large metal
basins as a head load. This was in 2008 when I spent a couple of months back
home for renovating our ancestral home. The masons and the coolies commenced
their work between 9 & 10 AM and broke for lunch at 1 PM. The men went to
the terrace for a smoke and a snooze and the women retired to the hall.
Unbidden, they switched on the ceiling fan and lied down for a brief rest. It
appears they have fans and colour televisions at home and on the days they
didn’t work, watched the telly, especially the ‘serials’.
But
according to the mason-contractor (having graduated from mason to contractor he
didn’t do manual work any more!) who engaged them there were no days when they
didn’t work. During summer they were busy in construction work. In early
monsoon, they worked as farm labour. And there was construction work again
between the monsoons. He said thanks to the rural employment guarantee scheme
nowadays it was difficult to engage them.
Rajiv
Gandhi had the candour (or naiveté) in his early days as a professional
politico to confess that of every rupee the government spent only eighteen
paise reached the intended beneficiaries. That his acolyte Mani Shankar Aiyar –
who is never tired of singing Rajiv carols - put a new spin on the economics of
poverty alleviation in a recent television debate is another matter. According
to Mani, who can spin words as well as the next man the eighty-two paise which
fall through the cracks in the system were actually ‘administrative’ expenses.
You can’t beat Mani in ‘spin’. He loves the sound of his voice, can pontificate
in a phoney Oxbridge accent and make the most inane utterance sound
‘intellectual’ as if to say, ‘I’m Sir Oracle; let no dog bark when I speak!’ He
quotes Marx and Engels and many others with unpronounceable names to make a
point that India would be better off without computers and blue jeans. For him
it would be best if the stock markets were closed as they were the play-fields
of only the super rich; that Pakistan is really a ‘saint’ state and an
ally.
The
rural employment guarantee scheme may be full of chinks and the system might be
leaking like a sieve making many middle men rich but their hard work did enable
the working class women (and their men) to watch colour television and loll
under a ceiling fan on a hot day. These people may not have been aware of a
gentleman called Pramod Mahajan whose tenure as telecom minister made it
possible for the woman maistree to carry her cellular phone (and
charger). They may not also be aware of a gentleman called A. Raja who milked
the same telecom for his ‘social justice’ projects. He is a part of the
society, isn’t he? What’s wrong if he did some ‘social justice’ for
himself? It is true, not all of us were aware of the enormity of A.
Raja’s ‘social justice’ projects, back then.
But
then this is the third India between the India of the rich and the ‘other’
India that is the darling of the prophets of doom, the ‘raison d’ etre’ of our
bleeding heart liberals. Between the black India that can stow away cash on the
black in those famed Swiss banks and the white or the ‘other’ India that sets
hearts racing to bleed there are a myriad shades of grey.
