“Wonder how the rural Indian poverty line came to be drawn at thirty-five rupees when these days the village folk flaunt five-hundred notes for a bus fare of fifty?”
“Well aren’t statistics the damned lies,” he said. “Instead of gloating over the blessings of life, man these days laments about the vicissitudes of fate, but in the days of yore thanks to the karma siddhanta, even the have-nots were happy for they didn’t suffer from the pangs of jealousy; what an idea karma is, attribute others’ fortune to their goodness in the previous birth and try being more humane in this one for a better time in the next round. But the ‘dream big’, ‘why not me’ and the ‘me too’ ethos of the day has become man’s bane as his insane pursuit of the moolah makes his life inane, and who can vouch for that better than me? Given my innate nature coupled with the ethos of the times and the philosophy of my upbringing, I shouldn’t have been left holding the wrong end of the get-rich stick.”
“It is the mistakes that give substance to life, don’t they?”
“It looks like the beauty of life lies more in its memory than in its living,” he said. “While the cow dung cakes were used for cooking food, kachika,its ash served as the family tooth powder; it was left for one to pick up the smoothest portion of it from the hearth, and all you needed for a clean tongue was a piece of palm leaf; why, they were as good for a head start for the day as the present day toothpaste and the metallic tongue-cleaner, but in recall, they acquire a beauty of their own. And in our town days, when tooth powder was all that my dad could afford for us, I didn’t feel wanting to have the merit-cum-means scholarship that was up for grabs; well I was only eleven then, but I could see that many of my classmates needed the dole more than I did though my miserly grandfather thought otherwise, but my dad, who, as I told you, didn’t deem it fit to claim the freedom fighter’s pension, was proud of my decision.”
“How contrasting it was, pardon my saying, from your latter-day ‘grab by all means’ credo.”
“Why didn’t that occur to me all these days?” he said and paused for long before he resumed. “In the hindsight I may say it was all owing to the gradual dissipation of the patriotic fervor in our free India, sadly, as Kamaraj put it, none thinks as an Indian but as an Andhraite, a Bengali, and a Bihari et al. And going back to the pre-independence days, it was my dad’s rashness that might’ve prompted his father to hasten his marriage; it was another matter that his one-upmanship in finalizing a match behind his son’s back left him with the egg on his face. But as if life has its own way of compensating, the beauty of the bride and the aura associated with the love-match made our surname a household name in the whole Taluka. Whatever, my grandfather was adept at the soft-sell of the irrelevant while missing out on the big picture of opportunities; how his double-speak used to amuse me in the matters of matchmaking. If his protagonist were to be the groom, he used to proclaim that dowries were on the raise, and should it be the other way round, then dowries had no other go than to nosedive; and how eager he was to know the ‘income’ as well as the ‘other income’ of whomever he met! Nothing odd about his enquiries as everyone was at it in those days, but then he tended to be more than just curious that was in spite of the rebuff he got from the first dalit government officialfrom our village, who said that he was paid enough to live well-enough. Why when it came to job choices for boys and groom preferences for girls, the under-the-table-earning came into in the reckoning; well where were the taxmen peeping over your shoulder those days? Don’t ever buy the argument that old is gold for Kautilya wrote about bribery in his Arthasastraof yore; but it’s one thing to satiate the corrupt and another to entice the decent; oh how we businessmen came to corrupt our country’s ethical core by inducing one and all onto the corrupt path of easy money! ”