Children of a Lesser God?

An eight-year old famished boy is howling for milk. His frustrated mother pours a colourless liquid into the glass the child helds out expectantly towards her. The little boy drains the liquid in a hurry.
After a while, the mother is seen carrying her son who had fallen asleep in the dirty yard outside, into the hut. The boy had apparently passed out after drinking the liquid. The liquid his mother poured into that little boy’s glass was hard liquor.
This is not a cooked up story, it is the cold-blooded reality of everyday life in a village called Saharsa in Bihar.
Shocked? Well, I am still reeling from it. I happened to watch this in a television channel and am yet to recover from the brutal unfairness of it all.
Children of this village are given hard liquor to fill their stomachs, to prevent them from pestering their parents for food, and to eventually push them into a deep unnatural slumber. Yes, sleeping children are never hungry and do not cry for food. If these little children are fortunate, they will get to have one meal a day; otherwise, they will have to retire at night with only alcohol in their rumbling stomachs and hazy, inebriated dreams to keep company.
Even the adults consume hard liquor to keep hunger temporarily at bay and to acquire some unnatural energy to continue with their menial day to day jobs.
Is it not truly shameful and disgusting that such unfair divide exists in our country even after fifty nine years of independence? On one side, we proudly exhibit meteoric industrial boom, glitter and glamour of the movie world and fashional IT parks and shopping malls in every nook and corner of the country. And on the other, this utterly tragic reality of hungry drunken children.
No wonder it is rightly said that India truly lives in her villages.
Next time you coax your child into drinking milk, do remember the little children in a remote village in Saharsa who dream of quenching their thirst with milk, but instead end up getting drunk with hard liquor.

Rain-kissed Earth

It is pouring in Parasuram’s land, Kerala; pouring to the beat of temple music, kathakali and folklore. Yes, rain does not diminish the artistic sensibilities of the people of God’s Own Country; on the contrary, rain complements the festivities. When the rain Gods magnanimously lavish all their attention on this land, she, like a love-sick bride waiting to be bathed by the first showers, opens up in all her splendour to her amorous lover. After the rain touches her beautiful surfaces, she blooms and glows in her multi-coloured hues. Her joy can be palpably seen and felt in the awesome green mountains, the overflowing lakes, the lush paddy fields and in the wet smiling faces of the people.

I am reminded of the excitement of waking up early on a rainy day and going to the temple with hair dripping from a wash and reveling in the surreal charm of the reflection of the lamps on the wet gleaming black stones of the temple. It is truly a fairy-tale sight, straight out of the heavens.

Rains usher in memories of childhood: of gleefully getting wet and wetting others, of bathing in the family pond in the midst of non-stop showers, of snuggling to the warm bosom of my mother to escape the cold, of listening to my grandmother recite stories and sing devotional songs to keep her grandchildren indoors, of creating a ruckus with my cousins, of savouring the hot piping delicacies made in the family kitchen and most of all; of moments lived with gay abandon when life was a rain-filled, joy-filled and laughter-filled existence.