Another rat in this race

- Mumbai, August 20th, 2015.

 

This city is strange.

A Mercedes Benz E class,  waits by a cycle rickshaw on a crowded suburban traffic signal. The man in the Benz is lost in his own thoughts - probably worried about his next monetary venture or his next luxury car. His decorated wife, fat and chubby, sat in the front seat beside him, her pinkish cheeks like a healing blister and her straightened hair like bristles of a cheap floor mop. She sat like an immovable boulder, munching on chicken legs from a typical ‘ bucket’. I saw her fan herself and wipe her face with handkerchief and extend out her plump hands to the ac button on the dash board.  Their two kids, caged in the passenger compartment, were looking out of either windows. One of them had their vision on the rickshaw wala. His eyes did not have sympathy or even empathy. I saw absent minded apathy in them. The rickshaw wala himself, drenched in sweat and exhausted, let the remaining of his leftover spirits be sublimed by the scorching afternoon sun. His long drawn face and furrowed temples spoke enough of his suffering. His wife and kid sat in the wooden ‘passenger’ seat, their shabby belongings bundled together in one corner. The woman used her saree fold to shade the kid from the cruel sun. The scraggy kid was unconsciously asleep. Both the mother and her son looked unwashed and greased all over.

Then, the signal turned green, and the race began. The Benz, pulled away with an overwhelming force and left in its wake, the rickshaw wala who had just managed a half pedal down.  

My bus honked past the rickshaw wala. Wafts of polluted air began strangling my nostrils. I let out a sly sigh. The sigh was not meant to be the end of an ongoing thought - rather simply a beginning of a deeper understanding.  Then the thought spoke to me -

"You would be fooling yourself If you convinced yourself that all your education and birth privileges have given you the liberty to be simply an independent observer to this whole play out. You are not. Because you are simply another rat in this race who for one moment, which felt eternally long, happened to observe other rats in this race. Look around! you are being observed by another rat in this race who is being observed by another rat in the race who is being ... "