Not the real India

The treasured only child of her parents. Someone who was encouraged to soar as high as her wings could take her. A person who held her own even in a not entirely equitable world. All these years, I genuinely believed that India allowed a woman to attain her potential.

The country I grew up in is not the real India.

In India, girls are killed before they are born; they are allowed to starve through neglect; they sold into sexual slavery; they are denied a voice at home; they are invisible in the community.

How long can such extremes co-exist?

_____

I visited rural Maharashtra in May. Saw women struggling to assert themselves, to claim their position in society. Change has to come- but how long will it take? This photograph forms a part of my Pictoral Flashback of 2011.

Breaking out of poverty, one school meal at a time

Where there is not enough money for food, children are put to work as soon as they are able. Untrained for anything but manual labour, their fate is decided the day they hoist the first load of bricks on their head. Even if they do squeeze in a few hours of informal education, they are too malnourished to really learn anything.

Enter free school lunches. One well-balanced meal guaranteed everyday. An incentive for parents to send their kids to school. Food that keeps children healthy, and receptive to being taught.

A chance to break out of the cycle of poverty.
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A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

Today is Blog Action Day, and the world is talking about Food. Join the conversation.

Sixty-one years of the Republic

[When I was a kid, I used to really look forward to Republic Day. But as I grow older, I increasingly find myself getting depressed every time the day rolls around.] 


Sixty-one years back, the People of India gave to themselves a Constitution, and proclaimed themselves a Republic.

One day back, a senior government official was burnt alive in broad daylight when he tried to alert officials about the pilferage of government property.

Is this the freedom and independence that the people of India fought so hard for? The freedom to steal what can be purchased openly. The independence to offer and accept bribes where things should work without them.

Corruption is the cause of all evil in the country. Remove it, and all problems are solved.

But remove it how?

_____

A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

The news article that horrified.

Freedom for a Nation

Sixty-three years ago, the Union Jack was taken down from the ramparts of the historic Red Fort in Delhi, and the Indian Tricolour hoisted in its place. After a long freedom struggle, the nation attained independence. For the first time ever, the nation was in charge of its own destiny. People dared dream big dreams. Social equality, education for all, an end to poverty, basic healthcare- dreams that people took for granted.

Sixty-three years later, we have failed on all counts. Vote bank politics have ensured that the country is still divided along caste, communal and linguistic lines. Our institutions of higher education may compare with the best in the world, but more than half the population of the country is functionally illiterate. Grinding poverty still forces millions of people to migrate from villages every year, despite the squalid conditions under which they are forced to live in the cities. And basic healthcare for all is as distant a dream today as it ever was. And add to it all a new problem- corruption across levels in all walks of life.

Has India, as a nation, failed?

Easy question. Difficult answer.

As a nation, India has failed to deliver on all the promises it made to its citizens. But despite everything, the people of India have survived. There are inequities and there is poverty, but at least in the cities, there are more people fighting to stay ahead of poverty than are people waiting for the government to bale them out. If only there was a way to wish away corruption, the people may just be able to make good the promises that the nation made to them.

E for Education

Though the Constitution of India guarantees free and compulsory education to children upto the age of 14, a third of the 200 million children between the ages 6 and 14 are not in school. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is the fact that there are just not enough schools to cater to all the children of school-going age, and the few schools that are there are so short staffed, the children don’t learn much in school and so are pressured to drop-out.

Studies have borne out the existence of the high drop-out rate. While enrollment in Grade 1 is nearly 85%, by the time they reach Grade 5, the figure drops down to less than 60%. Families that send their 6-year old children to school take them out almost as soon as the children become functionally literate.

The government machinery has failed totally where it comes to making education accessible for all.

Rather than look for viable alternatives, the Parliament of India, last week, passed the Right to Education Act making education a fundamental right of all children in the age group 6 to 14 years. In a nation which already guaranteed free and compulsory education, the intent of the Act doesn’t go much beyond semantics.

The only significant change is that the government has made it mandatory for all private schools to reserve 25% of their seats for economically disadvantaged children at the entry level. Since privately run schools necessarily need to make profits, the government would reimburse the expenditure incurred by the schools in making the seats available to children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

On the face of it, it seems like a great idea- when private schools are flourishing across the country, why not use that infrastructure to provide education for all? But is it really such a great idea? Tution fees account for only a small proportion of the total expenditure incurred in sending a child to private schools – there are uniforms and sports uniforms, books and stationary, field trips and costumes for annual days. Will the government reimburse all those expenses, and if it does not, will the parents be able to afford it?

Even if children from disadvantaged backgrounds enroll at the entry level, they are sure to drop out before the end of the year, leaving them no better off than they would have been in the absence of such reservations.

The situation seems almost hopeless. The government doesn’t have the infrastructure to provide education for all, and if accessing private schools is not a workable solution, does that mean children are destined not to get an education?

Not at all. The solution is there for all to see, but for some reason, the Government chooses to ignore it. Non-formal education!

Across urban and rural India, there are non-profit organizations that provide basic education to children of various backgrounds. There are organizations that conduct classes in workshops that employ child labour and there are organizations that conduct lessons within school buildings beyond school hours. There are organizations that train volunteers to conduct classes for small groups of children, and there are organizations that replicate the government system of one teacher schools in rural areas.

Instead of offering to reimburse private schools, if the Government pumps the same amount of money into non-profits, primary education for all need no longer remain a dream. I can only hope that the Government realizes it sooner rather than later.

I believe that “Education for All” is neither a slogan nor a dream- it is a basic entitlement, and while the Right to Education Act recognizes the fact, it is unlikely to go very far in actualizing it.

Discover....

Jan Morrison at Crazy Jane has started what she calls the Friday Challenge. Every Friday, she's going to challenge her readers to do something different. Last Friday's Challenge was a walking quest - in her own imitable style, she asked us to "Get off ...(our)... duffs and walk somewhere", and bring something back to share (or not).
Since the world is round, and I am almost at the other end of it, I read about her challenge only on Saturday. Which was good, because though I walk a lot every day, it is only on Saturdays that I am not focussed on getting from Point A to Point B in the shortest possible time.

I hoped to find something new, something that challenged me. I even kept my camera at home, because I wanted to savour the experience of discovery without being constrained to view it from behind the lens.

I took a few roads that I had never taken before, but did not find anything that I hadn't seen before. But, what I did find was a government school that had just gotten over. What I saw were mothers and children. What I saw were children in uniforms. What I saw was one child being taken home on a bicycle by her grandfather.

I saw girls getting an education. I saw communities that would be transformed by the educated girls. I saw the future of my country. I saw the future of the world.

More than anything else, I saw smiles and hope. Could anyone ask for anything else?

Transportation woes no more?

Living in India, as I do, climate change is a politically charged subject. The position of my country is clear – we were not responsible for creating this mess, you were. So do not now turn around and tell me not to add to the mess, because I will do so unless you either compensate me for the mess you have created, or you enable me to get to where I want to get without the attendant mess.

Fundamentally, I do not disapprove of the stand. Some nations have got to a point where they can afford greener technology by largely ignoring the environmental impact of their actions. They do, now, have a moral obligation to help other nations get to that point too. But for nations like mine to downplay their responsibility is downright shortsighted.

Just because some nations have taken a particular (environmentally destructive) route to development doesn’t mean there is no other. Two decades back, it was the aspiration of every middle class Indian to own a family car. Today, income levels have gone up to an extent where the same individuals have a car each- and no roads to drive them in.

As a nation, we should be looking at improving public transportation, so people are encouraged to keep their cars at home. Instead, we create the world’s cheapest car, so more people can afford to purchase four wheels and an exhaust pipe that further adds to the carbon emission levels.

Pedestrian walkways, an integrated transportation system, telecommuting, shifting business districts to reduce travel time. You don’t have to be an urban planner to know the solution to the woes that assail the larger Indian cities. Implementing them would require political will, but would also substantially improve the quality of life of every citizen of urban India. And reduce carbon emission in the bargain.

Wouldn’t it be more productive for the Powers that Are to start working on some of these issues, rather than just haranguing the ‘richer’ nations to pay a debt which they barely acknowledge?

The forgotten hero

Technically, I should have mentioned it yesterday, but I am participating in the NaBloWriMo blogging challenge. Participants agree to write one blog post per day (on our own blogs) during the month of October.

What's so great, you may ask. I have been blogging every day since I started the blog in July last year. And if I did not miss a single day even when there was nobody reading my blog, which should I miss a day now?

No reason to miss a day, but perhaps this is the time to get some structure into my blog, so I don't have a week of rants, followed by a week of kids, and another of drabbles. Right now, I am too tired to think of the structure that I am going to get in, but there will be one by the weekend - I promise.


Meanwhile, here is my post for the day-

One hundred and forty years after he was born, two years after the United Nations declared that his birthday would be celebrated as International Day of Non-violence, how many people in his country of birth even remember Mahatma Gandhi?

My nearly six year old knows that America was discovered by Amerigo Vespucci, and Australia by Captain James Cooke. He knows that John Dunlop was a veterinary doctor, and he has heard of James Stevenson. But while he can identify photographs of Gandhi, he has no idea who he was or what he stood for.

Practically every Indian pays token obeisance to the Father of the Nation- his picture even adorns the largest denomination currency notes - but few people know, or care to know what the man actually stood for.

Gandhi stood for equality. Gandhi stood for humanity. Gandhi stood for truth and justice.

Gandhi did not use force to press his demands, he forced people to listen to his demands by appealing to their good sense and humanity.

Albert Einstein said of him - "Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth". Perhaps, it is because we cannot comprehend what the man stood for, that we choose to ignore him ideals completely.

He was relevant in his time. He is equally relevant today. And he will continue to be relavant till his ideals are adopted universally, when the necessity of relevance itself will be lost.

The time to imbibe his humanity and his compassion is now. The world cannot wait.



Last year's post on Gandhi - here

Pedestrian woes

A forty feet wide road. Vegetable vendors, bangle sellers, stalls hawking cheap toys from China, handkerchief sellers, ‘anything else you may not even know you need’ vendors taking up five feet on either side. Customers haggling over goods- another foot or two. Two red double-decker buses can barely pass, yet they often need to.

Does that leave any place for pedestrians? No! But the street is also the only walking route to one of the busiest stations in Bombay and has a constant stream of people going both ways. Often, even when I try to press myself to one side, the buses almost graze my body, and if there are people hanging out of them, there is no way you can avoid physical contact.

Is it any wonder that it takes me barely ten minutes to walk down to the station in the morning before the vendors set up shop, but the time is more than doubled in the evening when the shoppers are out in full force.

To say that the walk back is a minor torture is a bit of an understatement. But the only alternative is to hail a three-wheel autorickshaw, which, because of the traffic bottlenecks, would actually take up more time.

And if you think about it, I am one of the lucky people. I stay about a kilometer away from the station and have the option to walk down. People who stay further away, actually end up spending more time getting home from the station than they do on the commute between stations. Is it any wonder that according to a recent study more people walk in Bombay than they do in any other Indian city?

Urban planners have experimented with restricting many of the streets to traffic going in a single direction only. But there just aren’t enough streets to allow that to be feasible (and there is nothing more dangerous to a pedestrian than a vehicle speeding the wrong way on a one-way street).

Removing the hawkers may partially alleviate the problem, but that is a politically charged issue that few administrators are willing to take up. And even if they do, the hawkers are brought back by public demand – if the vegetable vendors are removed from the main route home, women would have to go that extra distance to buy the ingredients for their evening meal.

As a ‘glass half full’ person, I refuse to admit that there is no solution. And I have come up with one – pedestrian skywalks! And not just any skywalk– skywalks with place reserved for hawkers of every hue. When hawkers are given safe places to work from, they should not be averse to shifting. And when pedestrians find that they can do their daily shopping without the danger of being run down by a bus, they should not mind using the skywalks. With the entire width of the road being freed for vehicular transport, there should be fewer traffic snarls, so more people would have the choice to not walk home.

Skywalk above, road below. Seems such a perfect solution – the only people who really lose would be the residents of the first floor of the buildings skirting the road. When they draw the curtains open, they may just find themselves looking into the eyes of random pedestrians! But they are not a substantial vote bank, are they?

A solution so simple, I wonder why nobody has thought of it yet. Or is there a catch somewhere that I am unaware of?

Colours of Navratri

To me it was one of those fun things you do in an organsation- during the nine days of Navratri, every working day was allocated a colour, which everyone was to come dressed in. The first of those days was ‘red day’. Since I don’t possess any appropriate office attire in the colour, I could have gone either in gym sweats or a saree. It being the festive season, I chose the latter.

On the train, the ladies standing on either side of me were in red. “They’d fit right into my office today”, the thought momentarily flitted across my mind. At the next station, half a dozen ladies boarded the train, all in red. At the terminus, I saw three women standing together in a group – all were in red. I looked around the compartment- more than half the people were in various shades of red.

This was getting almost spooky- was the entire city in red? “But it is the festive season, and red is a very popular colour”, I reasoned to myself, and shut my eyes to the colour.


The next day was ‘sky blue’ day, another colour missing from my wardrobe. I dug out a kurta I hadn’t worn for over six years, and which was three sizes too big for me. And guess what colour the lady sitting next to me on the train was in– you guessed it, sky blue! With an acute sense of déjà vous, I looked around – more than half the women and many of the men were in sky blue.

Things were getting really complicated. The entire city couldn’t be following the colour code of my organisation? I fiddled around with google, and discovered something a lifetime of living in India hadn’t taught me.

A different manifestation of the Mother Goddess is worshipped on each of the nine days of the festival, and each is associated with a different colour. Which is why, in some parts of India, women dress according to the time honoured ‘Colours of Navratri”. With organisations adopting the colour code, the practice has now gone beyond the religious and has entered the realm of a purely secular social custom.

Which perhaps explains why there was a preponderance of green when the idol of the Mother Goddess was being taken to her place of worship on Saturday.


Today is ‘yellow day’, and with every yellow saree, kurta, shirt, skirt, or scarf that I see, my heart soars. If the twenty million people of a city can come together for an activity like this, can’t they be galvanized to achieve practically anything. Isn’t the change we all need, just waiting to happen?

The things we take for granted

“Do we have to have so many lights on all the time?”
“What’s your problem? Do you think we can’t afford the electricity bill?”
“It is not about the bill, it is about the wastage. Maharashtra is a power deficit state, in case you don’t know.”
“So what? Bombay doesn’t have power cuts does it? And even if we did have power cuts, do you think one person turning off a light makes any difference to the electricity situation?”

When it reaches that point, in the interest of domestic harmony, I withdraw with whatever grace I can muster.

But in that one statement is the root of practically every problem- does the action or inaction of one random individual make any difference in the larger scheme of things. We choose to believe they do not, and use that to justify not changing our way of doing things. But if even a small percentage of individuals care enough to do things differently, they can bring about a change.

Consider electricity supply. Power tariffs are higher in Bombay than in the rest of the state, so the power plants in Maharashtra sell electricity to the distribution companies that service the city, before feeding power into the state grid. Which enables me to keep the lights blazing even at daytime, but ensures that the rest of the state has scheduled and unscheduled power cuts for several hours a day.

The equation is simple - for every hour that I unnecessarily keep an electric bulb on, I am depriving a schoolgirl in rural Maharashtra a light to study under. When children are forced to study using candlelight, when mothers don’t have any electrical appliances in their kitchen simple because there is no electricity to run them on, when whole families go to bed soon after sunset because there is no TV to keep them up longer – isn’t it almost criminal for me to waste electricity even if I can afford the monetary cost of doing so?

Sure, the only long term solution to the power crisis in the country is to generate more electricity, and to bring down transmission and distribution losses. But in the short term, can’t every one of us make a difference, however slight, by just turning off the fans and lights that we do not need?

And will we as a nation ever realize that while festive illuminations do make the city look almost magical, by turning them off, entire villages can enjoy uninterrupted power.

Transforming the City?

Tulsi Pipe Road (now renamed Senapathi Bapat Marg) is a six lane road that any city should be proud of. But this being Bombay, three of those lanes have been taken over as permanent dwellings by the nameless, faceless masses that keep the city going. And since people who commute in air conditioned cars prefer not to come in contact with poverty, the narrower but prettier sea-fronting Cadel Road (now named after the local hero, Veer Savarkar) became the arterial road, while this road was almost totally ignored.

When the former mill area of Lower Parel was redeveloped to become an alternative business district, Tulsi Pipe road started regaining some of its former importance. The multiple flyovers made it an easier road to navigate, but when there was an alternative route, people preferred to use it.

And then came the Wall Project.

The Municipality invited people to give full vent to their creativity on the wall marking the boundary between the Road and the rail tracks. The project was supposed to galvanise the city as none other had - to being people together to take charge of their surroundings.

The newspapers the next day were full of colourful pictures of people painting on the walls. The people who had turned up were a representation of the city itself – from people who have made the street their home to media professionals who work in Lower Parel. School kids, college students and the assortment of people with a civic conscience. The Project was hailed as the first of its kind where people who would never meet got together for the common cause of beautifying the city. Column inches were devoted to taking about Street Art coming of age in the country and of people taking charge of their communities. It seemed to be the Next Big Thing, and it was easy to get carried away.

The first time I took the road, it was a cloudy day, and I noticed the graffiti only because I was looking for it. But when the sun was out, the walls did look colourful and cheerful. There were panels that seemed to have almost a professional touch, and there were others that displayed more good intentions than talent. A street that normally wore a somber look had been transformed into something quite colourful and unique.

But, the lives of the residents who live in the shadow of those walls is playing out exactly as it used to. Nothing really has changed, except at the superficial level.

Is the Wall Project something to cheer about because it did get people together to take charge of their city if only for a day. Or should it be dismissed as yet another gimmick. I wish answers were as easy to find as questions are.

What is Freedom?

Independence Day, and newspapers and TV channels are full of people asking and answering the same question, “What does Independence mean to you?”

Putting aside the philosophical part of the question, what has Independence really meant to the average Indian? Sixty-two years is a really long time, and I really am not qualified to comment on how the nation has moved in that period, but I do know one area where the change has been apparent in just over a decade – essential services.

I remember a time, not too long ago, when being allotted a telephone connection was a big thing. You made an application for a land-line and forgot about it. You finally got your connection several months, or even years later, and even then, you could only use the telephone to make local calls. Even in upper middle class urban localities, there the average number of telephones per household was well below one.

And today? You can walk into a mobile showroom with the necessary documents and less than half and hour later walk out with a brand new SIM card. Almost everyone has a mobile phone, many more than one. Vegetable vendors use their mobile phones to take orders, bored housewives no longer block up the ‘family’ landline for hours on end, schools use them to pass on important messages to parents.

Not just telephony. The wait has reduced almost everywhere – it is easier to get a new cooking gas connection than to transfer an existing one, where you earlier had to book a car and wait months for it to be delivered, you can now walk into a car dealer showroom and drive out with your car.

Freedom means many things – to India, the greatest thing, perhaps, is freedom from waiting for things to happen.

Imagining India

‘Imagining India’ is a book I would never have picked up in the normal course of events. Not that I have anything against Nanadan Nilekeni himself. Just that, I am extremely wary of inflicting on myself a book that is likely to turn out to be a self-congratulatory account of events as interpreted by the ‘great man’. And a book that has as its cover a mug-shot of the man who describes himself as a ‘commentator’ appears to be just that.

Two random events conspired to make me buy the book. It was highly recommended by a colleague who mentioned how ‘awesome’ the book was at least twice every day. And I fell ill bang in the middle of a month when I had imposed a ‘no fiction unless interspaced by non-fiction’ ban on myself. If the book did speak about Pratham and Akshay Patra, two non-profits that I know do very good work, how bad could it be?

The book went with me to hospital, and by the time I finished the Preface, I knew that the only thing that would make me put the book down was sleep. What I liked most about the book was the undercurrent of cautious optimism. While most commentators tend to go overboard in either their praise or their censure, he admitted our shortcomings, and somehow managed to convert them into opportunities.

After reading the book, I found myself sliding back into the solutions mode that I thought I had left behind many years back. Yes, there is a lot wrong with and in India, but not all of it defies solutions. I know that I too am going to spend a lot of time ‘Imagining India’ in the next few weeks.

Jana Gana Mana....

While in school, it was mandatory to sing the national anthem at the school assembly at least once a week, but the song and I became virtual strangers after I started college. I must have heard the anthem about half a dozen times, and sung it not at all till my son started attending school a couple of years back. Now, I definitely hear it twice a year – on Independence Day and Republic Day – and since I insist on my children standing to attention whenever it si played on TV, I end up hearing it a lot more than I did previously.
And somewhere along the line, while mechanically going through the words, I discovered that the national anthem had the power to move me to tears. I am definitely not one of those people who wears their patriotism on their sleeves, but there is something in the song that resonates inside me, and makes me proud of the nation that I am a citizen of.
It was, however, a purely emotional reaction till yesterday. While singing the song yesterday at my son’s school, I was acutely aware of how much has changed since Independence Day when the same song was sung at the same venue by the same set of people. This time round, I was reveling not in what my country has accomplished, but dreaming about what she can do once people like me start taking ownership for steering her destiny.
There is nothing tangible that I can put my finger on, but I sense the coming change. I can see people thinking about India as a nation, and about what we can do to make a difference. Small things make me optimistic – last year, at the Standard Chartered marathon, people were shouting ‘Run Mumbai Run’. They did so this year too, but much more than that, people yelled ‘Go India Go’.
A cynic may dub it as token symbolism, but I think it goes beyond that. People are willing to invest time and effort in determining the destiny of India, and while change may be late in coming, I know it will.
Maybe the next time I sing the national anthem, the hope for a better tomorrow will be seasoned with the beginnings of concrete changes.
Who said I was not an optimist?

The Luxury of Choice

A worse start to the monsoons I hadn’t seen in my nearly ten years in the city. It had rained heavily every day for consecutive seven days, and it had been just my luck that I had to get out every single one of those days. I’d got used to hailing a dozen autos before one would agree to go where I wanted to, so was pleasantly surprised when the first auto I asked agreed to ferry me home.

I would have liked to take off my dripping raincoat, but decided to keep it on – at least it offered some protection against the treacherous breeze. A couple of minutes after I got onto the auto, it started raining, and the driver had to pull down the tarpaulin sheets was the only protection against the shower. Ensconced in my raincoat, I could enjoy the fine mist that made it way around the waterproof sheet and hit my face.

But what of the auto driver? All he had on was his normal uniform, which was collecting its fair share of the rainwater. Unlike me, he did not have the luxury of soon being able to get out of his wet clothes, and downing a mug of some warm beverage. How had he survived seven days of continuous rain? And how was he going to last out the rest of the monsoon?

As it so often did these days, my mind turned to whether or not the man would have chosen the same profession had he had the luxury of choice. If he had been better educated, if he had the initial start-up money to do something else, would he still have chosen to become an auto driver? At the best of times, it was a difficult job –pollution, traffic jams, irate customers – during the monsoons, could there be too many jobs that were worse than this one?

As if reading my thoughts, he spoke up – “Madam, the traffic situation in the city is really bad. Look at the number of cars on the road – it is five times what it must have been when I first came to the city. They have built a few flyovers, but what is the use – we need double the amount of road we have.”

I nodded ascent – “Yes, something drastic has to be done, and done soon. I am not sure how long the city can continue to function the way it now is.” We were on JP Road when I said this. Half the road had been blocked off for the proposed Metro Project. I wondered at the sheer stupidity of the timing of the project – it was scheduled to take 15 months to complete. Would it not have made more sense to start immediately after the monsoons so the road would be taken up only for one monsoon – would a delay of three months have really made such a difference?

Seeing me look at the corrugated sheets marking the boundary of the construction work for the Metro, he continued – “Look at that Project. Someone must have made a lot of money to allow the project to take off. What a waste of money it is. Two thousand crores, the project is costing, and how many people will one train seat – less than two hundred. What is the point of it at all – they may as well have spent the money constructing an elevated road along the same route, with entries and exits on SV Road, the Western Expressway, Powai….”

It was incredible – the man had the whole thing perfectly worked out. He didn’t need any traffic studies or dynamic programming to tell him exactly where the bottlenecks were, and to figure out how to work around them. Had his plan been implemented, traffic would have flowed much more smoothly, at least for the few years it took for the vehicle population to catch up with the increased road network.

I agreed totally with this man’s plan; had often toyed with similar solutions, but not on the scale that he was talking about. But I had to play Devil’s Advocate – “But a road would mean more vehicles using that road. Will it not be better to have people use mass transport?” He was a driver of an auto, but surely even he would realize that the solution to Mumbai’s traffic problem was better mass transportation facilities?

“Madam, what are you saying?”, he responded at once. “Do you think this Metro is going to reduce the number of people using autos? More people are going to take autos to get to the Metro station, and where is the place for an auto stand here? I am telling you Madam, traffic in this area is going to get much worse after this project takes off.”

I had to bow to this guy – he had more foresight than any of the highly paid consultants brought in to solve Mumbai’s traffic woes.

Access to capital had allowed him to purchase his own auto, but what a valuable resource he could have been had education be thrust on him. Maybe economic independence would enable him to educate his children, and maybe they would have inherited their father’s brains.

There must be many more like him, and maybe, just maybe, the next generation would be allowed to grow to their full potential.