What the rag picker on Mumbai - Pune Highway called me

When I was walking back to the guest house today, it was raining a bit. It was trying to rain properly, you know the wiggly rain, between a good hard rain and the moaning, crying drizzle.

It was very still, no breeze, no air. The atmosphere was suffocating, but it always feels good to walk in the rain, so I was just walking down. Sometimes, when we do what we like, we turn back to see if someone else is doing it. Do I look an ass hole? This question burns the nape of our neck every time we follow something close to us. If this close to us thing is far from everyone else, we just cower down into ourselves, biting our heart into submission.

The road, the Mumbai – Pune highway I was walking on, seemed empty. People had taken shelter, in the vestibules of road side shops, within petrol pumps, and within any enclosure they could find. All that was going on on the road, was the art of driving cars over puddles of water, so that the water splashes on the people who are hardy enough to walk in the rain. Even I like doing such things. It is such fun to see people run away when a car approaches for fear of muddying their trousers.

I also was looking around, just to check if I was looking the idiot, getting wet in the rain in Pune, the swine flu capital of India. I guess I must have just gone on walking. There was a rag picker who was well covered with a plastic overall who was diligently and nimbly going on with his work.

“Tere jaise admiyon se swing flu aata hai. Geela hote ho jaan bujkar, foreign jaate ho, najane aids, swing flu late ho……..pagal ho kya?”

“People like you bring swine flu. You get wet for the fun of it, you go abroad and bring aids, swine flu, and what not. Are you mad?”

He was not even looking at me, but he was loud enough for me to hear him, and he was referring to me. There was no one else around.

His wisdom tells him a lot of things. I don’t know in how many dimensions he thought in, but I could work out some number of angles in what he uttered casually.

a. Rich people bring rich diseases from rich places. The un-immunized man does not have the money to get cured of unique diseases. This is true in so many instances. Common flu & cold decimated from the Conquistadors wiped out entire South American civilizations. Transport and travel brings disease.
b. He is classifying me as belonging to a group of people who are very rash, and up to their nose in enjoying life. They try to drown in it, compared to his scraping dust bins day in and day out. At the same time he could be esteeming himself for wearing his odd looking patched up rain cover.
c. He is unable to digest the fact that I take my life so lightly. By god, I could catch swine flu and pass over to my maker very quickly.

I was stupefied, not at that moment. But his sentence kept forming in my mind for the next five minutes. The full import of what he was thinking got to me when I entered the apartment complex. I stopped at a tea shop, was having hot cha, when I saw that I was not alone. People old and young were walking by, though far and few, as if nothing had happened. They were soaking wet, but they never really did mind. So I was not alone.

But what mattered was this. This was the first time, something someone very far removed from my own class of people had said to me had affected me or stuck to me. This is odd. I travel a lot, meet a lot of people, but this is a comment regarding my lifestyle.

Often, we just hear what we want to hear. The rest gets drowned out intentionally at first, but unintentionally later on. I think I am following a fling by getting wet in the rain, and for the rag picker on the Mumbai - Pune highway, I am a perfect idiot, a social menace. That’s a point of view I never expected to be encountered with.

We always form a vision of ourselves, and once we have a pride in our own self, people around us just start portraying our image to us. This becomes our environment, our emotions, our tastes, our friends, our habits, our everything. But suddenly, a rag picker on the Mumbai – Pune highway thinks I am a social menace! What originality!

Sometimes, we just forget that every rag picker, beggar, destitute, slum dweller will have an opinion on us. We just get overshadowed by ourselves and our image. We go to work, read a few things, invest, get married, and yet without knowing, we think this is the right thing to do & the right way to live. We could be trampling a lot of things on the way, without getting off our sleep walk.

Maybe, people like me, and people like you, who have internet in their homes, offices, the connected guys you know, who go to work with their brains alone, who have reduced the labor with the body to a lower social class, are a social menace. Because people like us are what - 2% of India and the other 98% may be thinking of the 2% as a menace.

I know what you will be thinking now. How will the rag picker survive, if people don’t earn enough to throw away stuff? We are making his livelihood, could be a starting point.