Things That Bang

At a red light today I saw a beggar woman with a kid nursing on her breast. The baby was in a sling and the mother begged while the kid half heartedly chewed her nipple.

No one cared. She went up to people on bikes, cars, trucks and even bicycles but people waved her away. No one gawked. Think that shows India has improved or has less voyeuristic tendencies?

Actually it's quite the opposite. If there was a middle class woman breast feeding the entire traffic would have come to a standstill. I am exaggerating but you get the drift. No one cares about the poor. Especially those barely scraping the bottom.

I remember as a kid seeing an emaciated man lying outside the Gate of our school church. He suffered from acute dysentery and his feces lay around him.

We all averted our eyes and walked on. I was six at the time and did what everyone else did, covered my nose and look away from naked man who could just as well have been dying.

The next day he wasn't there and the place had been cleaned up. Who knew what happened to the man?

The memory stayed with me just like the one of seeing another poor man left at the gate of AIIMS hospital in Delhi. Filthy, deranged man crying for help but we all moved on.

These are the people who fall through the cracks and never make it back up again.

They are no different from us - humans and yet we treat them worse than animals. No one speaks for them, no one sees them, they are the forgotten ghosts living amongst us. Are they even considered to be citizens of this country? What rights do they have?

Once in a while they leave a mark, a bruise on our conscious demanding that we see them for what they are - people no different from us.

A small beggar child with a naughty smile or a old emaciated man who cowered thinking he was being hit when all the other individual did was hand him over some loose change.