To
People with textbooks in hand
In a makeshift classroom under a tin roof, there are thirty bedraggled students. In another classroom with an air conditioner, there are sixty, seated immaculately on polished wooden benches. Each classroom is aware of the other. The one harbouring clean faces has a remote understanding of what the word ‘Marx’ is supposed to mean. The other one, with dirty faces which resemble sewer rats, has no idea and also does not care. Dirty faces are either forced to come to school and dream of becoming the next Superman or the President, or they are withdrawn from school at an early age.
There is no concept of revolution in the shanties or the parched fields or in clogged gutters. There is just an old, internalised, inescapable concept—’survival’.
The nation keeps swinging between both classrooms, unable and unwilling to strike a balance.
Therefore, universities can keep harping on an on about Marx and ‘class consciousness’. But it will forever be the language of the elites. It will not apply to my maid whose husband was an abusive drunkard, to the security guard who cycled over eight kilometres to work, or to a poor woman I knew who once saved up thousands of rupees to buy a cricket kit for an unworthy son (who ultimately, as it turned out, neither went to school nor to the cricket academy).
Maybe that ‘consciousness’ which arises from desperation and helplessness, is not innate in most human beings. For every trade union where somebody has got the other’s back, there are scores of ‘individual’ widows or maids who do not want to or know how to rebel. Maybe they do not want to be roused from their slumber. Of what use are these rebellions which will only make their lives infinitely worse, before they even turn towards the better. Revolutions are a way to acquiring power. Sheer power, as it turns out, cannot be the answer to anyone’s problems. If the society keeps working on the premise of a revolution coming upon its head someday, there will never be a solution.
And so it is that we, absolutely terrified of being toppled over and banging our own heads into the wall, refuse to give the poor their fair share of human rights. We don’t want the kingdom of sewer rats to establish their reign. But then there are the poor and the Marxists, seething with inexplicable rage. Neither should they have aimed for complete and absolute power.
Now if there was a middle way, my maid would certainly take it. She’d be glad that no one was robbing her of equality. Some of us would be glad that the kingdom of angry maids no longer exists.
From
Yours truly
