Each one of us has, at some time or the other boiled water in an open pot and watched with amazement the water getting hot and making gentle waves to start with and later as if in protest before letting off Steam.
Under normal conditions, the first bubbles are mostly nitrogen with oxygen and a bit of argon and carbon dioxide. As you continue heating the water, the molecules gain enough energy to transition from the liquid phase to the gaseous phase.
Under normal conditions, the first bubbles are mostly nitrogen with oxygen and a bit of argon and carbon dioxide. As you continue heating the water, the molecules gain enough energy to transition from the liquid phase to the gaseous phase.
These bubbles are water vapor.
Right now as I pen this piece, I find a strong analogy between Boiling Water and the current situation in India facing the Covid 19 epidemic, the lock downs and associated turmoils combined with crashing economy.
Whilst Oxygen, Nitrogen, Argon and Carbon dioxide are associated losses from water akin to death toll, job losses, collapse of businesses etc that the govt is doing its best to address; it is the bit where as you continue heating the water, the molecules gaining enough energy to transition from the liquid phase to the gaseous phase and leaving the body of water for ever and this reminds me of Labourers from Poorer states working in many Indian Metros, who are virtually invisible to the rest of the urban self centred society, who just do not recognise the existence of these invisible souls, leave alone appreciate the services like building the posh gated apartments, serving food in restaurants, cleaning the streets and sewers and working as maids cooking seven days a week for the memsahibs.
Guess what they are called ? "Migrant Workers".
What a Sad State of Affairs
I shed no tears for people who have died from Covid as it was their destiny and all of us have to die one day; but to call Indian Citizens from another State "Migrant Workers" is disgusting , callous and not at all acceptable. They are part of our extended families and ought to be treated better.
And just like water vapour they have risen in silent protest and left these cold heartless metros and gone for ever, never to come back to their sordid lives in the metros. They are the Slaves of Modern India, a Voiceless Population
The following article triggered this Reaction in me.
What have we all become ?
The Sound of Silence
by Simon Garfunkel
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
*THE MIGRANT*
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi is an Indian author. His debut novel The Last Song of Dusk (2004) won the Betty Trask Award (UK), the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, and was nominated for the IMPAC Prize in Ireland. Translated into 16 languages already. He has written a much thought provoking piece here on why labourers are heading home in droves.
*The Migrant*
They are not fleeing the pandemic; they’re fleeing us. They took one long, clear, searing look at us – identified us as the industrial strength ingratiates that we are – and they packed their bags and left. It wasn’t the bug, it wasn’t being denied wages, it wasn’t heat, it wasn’t the filth, it wasn’t even the slumlord’s overnight eviction.
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
*THE MIGRANT*
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi is an Indian author. His debut novel The Last Song of Dusk (2004) won the Betty Trask Award (UK), the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, and was nominated for the IMPAC Prize in Ireland. Translated into 16 languages already. He has written a much thought provoking piece here on why labourers are heading home in droves.
*The Migrant*
They are not fleeing the pandemic; they’re fleeing us. They took one long, clear, searing look at us – identified us as the industrial strength ingratiates that we are – and they packed their bags and left. It wasn’t the bug, it wasn’t being denied wages, it wasn’t heat, it wasn’t the filth, it wasn’t even the slumlord’s overnight eviction.
They just realized who we were – people who saw other humans as essentially a replaceable means to an end – and they decided to replace us. And none of us – a middle-class, virtue signaling, carbon foot print counting, urban constituency of mid-of-career hashtaggers – imagined that our employees would left swipe us. But yes, that’s exactly what happened.
So where do we start?
So where do we start?
By STOP calling them migrants. They live and work here, in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore. This is their home, although they might – like us – have birth homes, too.
The phrase ‘migrant worker’ is consciously disempowering.
Migrant is reinforced in media discourse to divest something vital: an assertion of residency in the same city as ourselves. Does it scare us to think that they might inhabit the same public space as us?
By repeatedly calling them migrants we also suggest that we can simply ‘pack them back to where they came from’.
A reinforcement of the word migrant diminishes their agency as tax paying citizens; it invisibles them by equating them with wandering beings, (as if a pack of sheep) and it detracts from their more powerful role as citizen, by insinuating that they are essentially homeless and therefore entirely reliant on the host state for residence.
In essence, an elite existentialist’s reprehensible rap set: they not from here/they here to clean/ and cook/ and cook/ and clean/ where de go from dis pad/ well, sista, w’knows?
Every time you think – Thank God I have a home of my own in this pandemic – you acknowledge all those who had originally left their own home, traveled hundreds of miles, shacked up under plastic roof shanties for months, without a kitchen or indoor plumbing, to build that house you now call home.
Every time you think – Thank God I have a home of my own in this pandemic – you acknowledge all those who had originally left their own home, traveled hundreds of miles, shacked up under plastic roof shanties for months, without a kitchen or indoor plumbing, to build that house you now call home.
Those Indians walking on the streets, hungry, dispossessed, broken, betrayed by the government they voted into power, betrayed by the people whose businesses they established – they’re the folks who made the place sheltering you during this storm of storms. They are not migrant workers: they are the original founders of your home.
No one out of choice, or from lack of judgment, sleeps on train tracks. Tracks suggest a path to your village, serving as compass for those without the privilege of GPS. Most services during lockdown were said to be shut: so why would the trains be running?
No one out of choice, or from lack of judgment, sleeps on train tracks. Tracks suggest a path to your village, serving as compass for those without the privilege of GPS. Most services during lockdown were said to be shut: so why would the trains be running?
People sleep on train tracks also from abject desperation, when rabid sun and flaring hunger connive to suspend rational thought. And what happens when people die on tracks?
From a Quora thread: ‘With a high-speed hit all you get is lots of blood spray, chunks of flesh, organ and bone with the odd recognizable chunk thrown in.’ Now imagine, for a moment, their funeral.
When the rich come back from London or Rome, bringing home some of the contamination, we don’t ask – Who told you to go to Europe and fall sick? So on what account do we ask the poor: Why were you sleeping on train tracks?
I am not equating the two questions but I am asserting my right to question an establishment that believes it is wrong for me to prioritise one question over the other. And, for the record, the correct answer to the question is: They’d never have been sleeping on train tracks if they were, instead, in the trains and on their way home to their villages.
There is a clear difference between Indian workers who walked to their villages from Delhi and Mumbai versus their peers in Bangalore. Workers in Bombay and Delhi were fleeing joblessness or eviction. But workers in Bangalore were being held back (restrained, forbidden free passage).
There is a clear difference between Indian workers who walked to their villages from Delhi and Mumbai versus their peers in Bangalore. Workers in Bombay and Delhi were fleeing joblessness or eviction. But workers in Bangalore were being held back (restrained, forbidden free passage).
Their trains were canceled after the builder lobby realized that if labor vanished, so would their projects. Much like slaves – or in keeping in with our indigenous traditions of bonded labor - Indian citizens were not allowed to travel home.
The nexus between capitalists and governments is devious enough to hold you in captivity. Like an animal.
This, in Bangalore, famous for vegan cafes, beer gardens, and now this, a postmodern riff on slavery.
But the recommencement of the Indian economy never factored for an unsettling absence of labour; after all, they assumed: where the hell would the migrants go? As it turns, they would go any place where people did not treat them like vermin, as disposable, as replaceable, and where they endured a need-based visibility, which is to say: when we need them, we see ‘em.
But the recommencement of the Indian economy never factored for an unsettling absence of labour; after all, they assumed: where the hell would the migrants go? As it turns, they would go any place where people did not treat them like vermin, as disposable, as replaceable, and where they endured a need-based visibility, which is to say: when we need them, we see ‘em.
But now that the labourers’ left, the majdoors have left us in a majboori: no one here to lay a brick, and without a maid, who’s cleaning the toilet? Because that’s where we are at right now, in the toilet, and it seems we might be here a while.
Madhusree's Response:
So beautifully written..so touching...in this Corona crisis we drew our emotional sustenance from all of us staying together at home, sharing whatever food we have.. (this morning I made for breakfast a dish with only Two slender pieces of chicken, some rice..all leftovers.and enjoyed so greatly). Home is so sweet. Home is Heavenly for all inspite of many problems and differences. But what is paining me is the plight and disrespect that our brothers and sisters.
Our migrant workers.. are going through....how touching that these jobless, homeless, penniless suffering people now just want desperately to go home where hunger, poverty, uncertainty and despair reign...they are walking miles under scorching sun, dying on their way due to fatigue and accidents, they are walking on the road in the darkness and at night where tiger walks..BUT WHY...only because they want to be at home with their loved ones. I think they knew how their country men rank them..migrants..long before the nation became vocal...they need to go home to die of Corona, hunger or frustration rather than live in complete alienation, marginalization and being labelled not as a precious part of the nation, not as the strength behind the country's economic development but as migrant worker..much like the DALITS..sad , saaad, very very sad.
NOW LOOK AT THE MIGRANT WORKERS OF SINGAPORE
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Look in the mirror:
Avay Shukla, IAS write, rather well, rather strongly, on topical issues.
View from [Greater] Kailash
Thursday, 21 May 2020
THE LOCK DOWN DIARIES (VIII)
FEEL A LITTLE SHAME FOR THE LOST SOUL OF A NATION.
This is not about the sorry exodus of millions of our more unfortunate brothers and sisters playing out on prime TV these days. It is not a piece about the government, or about politics or economics. It is neither critical nor sacerdotal. It is not about Mr. Modi or the Biblical scale suffering he has inflicted, yet again, on those who had put their trust in him. That is a matter between him and his Maker, and I hope the potter who moulded him can forgive him, for history will not. This is not about a callous Finance Minister with the rictus of arrogance stretched across her face. It is not about a judiciary which has thrown away its moral compass in the arid deserts of ambition and preference. It is not about a media which has struck a Faustian bargain with the devil and is content to feed on the offal flung its way. It is not about Rahul Gandhi or Mayawati or Nitish Kumar for they have already become irrelevant to the pathetic course of events unfolding.
This piece is about me and the burden I carry, a burden of shame, that has been sitting on my back for the last few weeks and cannot be dislodged, no matter how hard I try. It' s a burden which just got heavier this morning when I read a post by an army officer describing his moving encounter in Gurgaon with families of "migrants" walking their way to Bihar, no footwear on the weary soles treading on melting roads, hungry and uncomprehending four year olds, of how they wept and tried to touch his feet when he gave them a few five hundred rupee notes.
I hang my head in shame in the India of 2020. At belonging to a country and a society which exiles tens of millions from their cities, fearful of catching an infection from them, from a virus brought here, not by them, but by my brethren flying in from abroad. Of treating the hapless victim as the perpetrator. Ashamed of being a gullible cretin who swallows all the lies and half-truths churned out by a dissembling official apparatus. Of beating pots and pans as a servile hosanna to an uncaring presiding deity to drown out the sounds of tired feet marching to their distant villages.
I can no longer recognise the religion I was born into, it no longer has the wisdom of its ancient sages and rishis, or the compassion of an Ashoka, or the humility of a Gandhi. It is too full of anger, of hatred, of violence. It has replaced its once lofty ideals with even loftier statues, caring deeds with dead rituals. It once fed the mendicant and the poor but now drives them away as carriers of some dreadful disease, without any proof. It even finds an opportunity in this pandemic to stigmatize other religions.
I am ashamed of my middle class status, of many of my friends, colleagues and the larger family even. Cocooned safely in our gated societies and sectors, we have locked out our maids, drivers, newspaper man, delivery boy and a dozen others who have built for us the comfortable lives we now desperately try to cordon off from the less fortunate. We have deprived them of their livelihoods. We encourage another extension of the lockdown because our salaries and pensions are not affected. Our primary concerns revolve around resumption of deliveries from Amazon and Swiggy: the lot of the migrating millions is dismissed as just their fate- the final subterfuge of a society that no longer cares.
I am ashamed of the thought processes of my class, of Whatsapp forwards that oppose any more "doles" to the hungry millions, that denounce MNREGA- the only lifeline the returning labour have left- as a waste of public money and food camps as a misuse of their taxes. I am ashamed that people like me can encourage the police to beat up the returning hordes for violating the lockdown, which, in the ultimate analysis was meant to protect "us" from "them". For the life of me I am unable to comprehend how we, sitting in our four BHK flats, have the heartlessness to blame sixteen tired labourers for their own deaths: why were they sleeping on railway tracks? How can one not be ashamed when I hear my peers decrying the expense of trains/ buses for the returning migrants, the costs of putting them up in quarantine, when they approve of their likes being flown back by Air India ? This is not double standards, this is bankrupt standards.
I am ashamed of my social milieu which lauds the leader for dismissing the cataclysmic sufferings of almost five percent of our population as "tapasya", as if they had a choice. I am mortified to see the layers of education and affluence, the facade of civilisation being peeled back by a virus to disclose a heart of darkness in our collective inner core, the sub cutaneous mucous of hatred and intolerance for a minority community, contempt for the destitute. All age old prejudices, bigotry, racism and narrow mindedness have reemerged, fanned by a party which has fertilised their dormant spores.
I am ashamed of the dozens of four star Generals and beribboned Admirals and Air Chiefs who were quick to shower flowers and light up ships at a dog whistle from a politician but did not move a finger to provide any help to the marching millions. Did it even occur to them that they owe a duty to this country beyond strutting around at India Gate? That they could have used their vast resources and vaunted training to set up field kitchens for the hungry marchers, putting up tents where the old and infirm could catch a few breaths, arrange transport for ferrying at least the women and children?Their valour has been tested at the borders, but their conscience has certainly been found wanting.
I am ashamed of our judges who have now become prisoners in their carefully crafted ivory towers, who had repeated opportunities to order the executive to provide meaningful relief and succour to the exiled wretches, to enforce what little rights they still have left, but spurned them at the altar of a dishonourable appeasement.
I am ashamed of our governments who have forsaken the very people who elected them, and are using their vast powers, not to provide the much needed humanitarian aid these disorganised workers desperately need, but to take away even the few rights they had won over the last fifty years. I am ashamed of a bureaucracy that uses a catastrophe to further enslave those who have already lost everything, which insists that illiterate labourers fill in online forms to register for evacuation, pay hundreds of rupees ( which they do not have) for rail tickets, produce ration cards and Aadhar before they can get five kgs of rice, all the while beating them to pulp. Of a Joint Secretary to government who can apportion blame for the infections by religion. This is not Orwellian or Kafkaesqe, this is a government gone berserk. How can one not be ashamed of such a soul-less administration, and of the people who commend its mistakes?
They will reach their homes ultimately, those marching millions, minus a few thousand who will die on the way. They will not even be mentioned in the statistics: there will be no Schindler's list for them. And we will pat ourselves on our collective, genuflecting backs that one problem has been taken care of, the danger to our neo-liberal civilisation has been beaten back, the carriers have been sent away, the curve will now flatten. But the mirror has cracked and can never be made whole again. As the Bard said, the fault is not in our stars but within us. Or, as delectably put by another great bard, one of our own who now belongs to the "others":
" Umar bhar Ghalib yahi bhool karta raha,
Dhool chehre par thi, aur aina saaf karta raha."
Actually, this piece is not just about me- it's also about you, dear reader. Look into that cracked mirror. Do you feel any shame, just a little , for what we have become, for the lost soul of a once great nation?
Madhusree's Response:
So beautifully written..so touching...in this Corona crisis we drew our emotional sustenance from all of us staying together at home, sharing whatever food we have.. (this morning I made for breakfast a dish with only Two slender pieces of chicken, some rice..all leftovers.and enjoyed so greatly). Home is so sweet. Home is Heavenly for all inspite of many problems and differences. But what is paining me is the plight and disrespect that our brothers and sisters.
Our migrant workers.. are going through....how touching that these jobless, homeless, penniless suffering people now just want desperately to go home where hunger, poverty, uncertainty and despair reign...they are walking miles under scorching sun, dying on their way due to fatigue and accidents, they are walking on the road in the darkness and at night where tiger walks..BUT WHY...only because they want to be at home with their loved ones. I think they knew how their country men rank them..migrants..long before the nation became vocal...they need to go home to die of Corona, hunger or frustration rather than live in complete alienation, marginalization and being labelled not as a precious part of the nation, not as the strength behind the country's economic development but as migrant worker..much like the DALITS..sad , saaad, very very sad.
NOW LOOK AT THE MIGRANT WORKERS OF SINGAPORE
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Look in the mirror:
Avay Shukla, IAS write, rather well, rather strongly, on topical issues.
View from [Greater] Kailash
Thursday, 21 May 2020
THE LOCK DOWN DIARIES (VIII)
FEEL A LITTLE SHAME FOR THE LOST SOUL OF A NATION.
This is not about the sorry exodus of millions of our more unfortunate brothers and sisters playing out on prime TV these days. It is not a piece about the government, or about politics or economics. It is neither critical nor sacerdotal. It is not about Mr. Modi or the Biblical scale suffering he has inflicted, yet again, on those who had put their trust in him. That is a matter between him and his Maker, and I hope the potter who moulded him can forgive him, for history will not. This is not about a callous Finance Minister with the rictus of arrogance stretched across her face. It is not about a judiciary which has thrown away its moral compass in the arid deserts of ambition and preference. It is not about a media which has struck a Faustian bargain with the devil and is content to feed on the offal flung its way. It is not about Rahul Gandhi or Mayawati or Nitish Kumar for they have already become irrelevant to the pathetic course of events unfolding.
This piece is about me and the burden I carry, a burden of shame, that has been sitting on my back for the last few weeks and cannot be dislodged, no matter how hard I try. It' s a burden which just got heavier this morning when I read a post by an army officer describing his moving encounter in Gurgaon with families of "migrants" walking their way to Bihar, no footwear on the weary soles treading on melting roads, hungry and uncomprehending four year olds, of how they wept and tried to touch his feet when he gave them a few five hundred rupee notes.
I hang my head in shame in the India of 2020. At belonging to a country and a society which exiles tens of millions from their cities, fearful of catching an infection from them, from a virus brought here, not by them, but by my brethren flying in from abroad. Of treating the hapless victim as the perpetrator. Ashamed of being a gullible cretin who swallows all the lies and half-truths churned out by a dissembling official apparatus. Of beating pots and pans as a servile hosanna to an uncaring presiding deity to drown out the sounds of tired feet marching to their distant villages.
I can no longer recognise the religion I was born into, it no longer has the wisdom of its ancient sages and rishis, or the compassion of an Ashoka, or the humility of a Gandhi. It is too full of anger, of hatred, of violence. It has replaced its once lofty ideals with even loftier statues, caring deeds with dead rituals. It once fed the mendicant and the poor but now drives them away as carriers of some dreadful disease, without any proof. It even finds an opportunity in this pandemic to stigmatize other religions.
I am ashamed of my middle class status, of many of my friends, colleagues and the larger family even. Cocooned safely in our gated societies and sectors, we have locked out our maids, drivers, newspaper man, delivery boy and a dozen others who have built for us the comfortable lives we now desperately try to cordon off from the less fortunate. We have deprived them of their livelihoods. We encourage another extension of the lockdown because our salaries and pensions are not affected. Our primary concerns revolve around resumption of deliveries from Amazon and Swiggy: the lot of the migrating millions is dismissed as just their fate- the final subterfuge of a society that no longer cares.
I am ashamed of the thought processes of my class, of Whatsapp forwards that oppose any more "doles" to the hungry millions, that denounce MNREGA- the only lifeline the returning labour have left- as a waste of public money and food camps as a misuse of their taxes. I am ashamed that people like me can encourage the police to beat up the returning hordes for violating the lockdown, which, in the ultimate analysis was meant to protect "us" from "them". For the life of me I am unable to comprehend how we, sitting in our four BHK flats, have the heartlessness to blame sixteen tired labourers for their own deaths: why were they sleeping on railway tracks? How can one not be ashamed when I hear my peers decrying the expense of trains/ buses for the returning migrants, the costs of putting them up in quarantine, when they approve of their likes being flown back by Air India ? This is not double standards, this is bankrupt standards.
I am ashamed of my social milieu which lauds the leader for dismissing the cataclysmic sufferings of almost five percent of our population as "tapasya", as if they had a choice. I am mortified to see the layers of education and affluence, the facade of civilisation being peeled back by a virus to disclose a heart of darkness in our collective inner core, the sub cutaneous mucous of hatred and intolerance for a minority community, contempt for the destitute. All age old prejudices, bigotry, racism and narrow mindedness have reemerged, fanned by a party which has fertilised their dormant spores.
I am ashamed of the dozens of four star Generals and beribboned Admirals and Air Chiefs who were quick to shower flowers and light up ships at a dog whistle from a politician but did not move a finger to provide any help to the marching millions. Did it even occur to them that they owe a duty to this country beyond strutting around at India Gate? That they could have used their vast resources and vaunted training to set up field kitchens for the hungry marchers, putting up tents where the old and infirm could catch a few breaths, arrange transport for ferrying at least the women and children?Their valour has been tested at the borders, but their conscience has certainly been found wanting.
I am ashamed of our judges who have now become prisoners in their carefully crafted ivory towers, who had repeated opportunities to order the executive to provide meaningful relief and succour to the exiled wretches, to enforce what little rights they still have left, but spurned them at the altar of a dishonourable appeasement.
I am ashamed of our governments who have forsaken the very people who elected them, and are using their vast powers, not to provide the much needed humanitarian aid these disorganised workers desperately need, but to take away even the few rights they had won over the last fifty years. I am ashamed of a bureaucracy that uses a catastrophe to further enslave those who have already lost everything, which insists that illiterate labourers fill in online forms to register for evacuation, pay hundreds of rupees ( which they do not have) for rail tickets, produce ration cards and Aadhar before they can get five kgs of rice, all the while beating them to pulp. Of a Joint Secretary to government who can apportion blame for the infections by religion. This is not Orwellian or Kafkaesqe, this is a government gone berserk. How can one not be ashamed of such a soul-less administration, and of the people who commend its mistakes?
They will reach their homes ultimately, those marching millions, minus a few thousand who will die on the way. They will not even be mentioned in the statistics: there will be no Schindler's list for them. And we will pat ourselves on our collective, genuflecting backs that one problem has been taken care of, the danger to our neo-liberal civilisation has been beaten back, the carriers have been sent away, the curve will now flatten. But the mirror has cracked and can never be made whole again. As the Bard said, the fault is not in our stars but within us. Or, as delectably put by another great bard, one of our own who now belongs to the "others":
" Umar bhar Ghalib yahi bhool karta raha,
Dhool chehre par thi, aur aina saaf karta raha."
Actually, this piece is not just about me- it's also about you, dear reader. Look into that cracked mirror. Do you feel any shame, just a little , for what we have become, for the lost soul of a once great nation?
