A cup of strong coffee

From Arpi’s syaahi…… (Post 3)
Date: 18th August, 2009

hmmm..... its 2:30 am and i am wide awake. the application i was developing took another of it's snail step and i decided to treat myself with a cup of hot coffee. I wanted to keep working all night so i decided to make a strong one. While juggling with 3 milk powder and 2 coffee powder sachets, i searched for my long forgotten saucepan and prepared the strongest coffee i ever had. I just couldnt sip it. So, i just called my angel, sugar to help me out. it worked and i had a delightful strong but sweet coffee.The same must have happened with delhi on this independence day when Ms Sheila Dixit, H'ble Chief Minister of Delhi promised to make Delhi a slum free state. Now, the way i couldn’t reduce the strong bitter taste of my coffee but hid it under the sweetness of sugar, the same is being done here. Just to make the city beautiful and give a feel good factor to the citizens of Delhi, the CM of Delhi has promised the city that within few years, there would be no slums in Delhi- hmm…. a feel good factor indeed… a treat for the eyes atleast.


However, a question still arises… what about the people dwelling within the poor walls of tin, polythene, paper etc.? What is going to happen with them? We think, the government must have thought of something but the truth unfolds when we see more and more people sleeping on the footpath, beneath the flyovers, beside the ATMs. Slums can vanish; slum dwellers can’t vanish in a blink unless and until there’s no substantial plan for their settlement. They only shift their homes like nomads in a civilized jungle. It takes months of savings and a lot of courage and compromise to erect a new hut for those under BPL but it takes merely an order and a bulldozer to ground it.


Of course, it is not a good picture to see little kids who have hardly seen 4-5 Independence days in their life, selling flags made of paper, plastic or clothes. They might know what things diwali and holi mean but I don’t think they know what Independence Day and Republic Day means. They still live in a before-independence India, under the foreign rule- of the Indians, for the Indians and by the Indians. They do not have the rights to live where they want and are left on the mercy of government.


Another question- is contesting an election and winning in India a day dreaming competition? How high can you build a hawai mahal assuming that there’s nothing like an earthquake? It’s so easy to set targets, shout them out and forget later. Do you remember the Bollywood movie Nayak? Not taking into account the overly done things, I liked one thing in the movie…. the interview part. The protagonist had the perfect questions to ask each and every Indian politician. Why can’t we have all the candidates sharing the same stage, debating and chalking out a plan for a better future? Why is only government and not the opposition responsible for the country’s development? It doesn’t have power but it does have opinion. Why does it have to use its vote against the government and not in the support of development? It takes years to assemble experts and make them work together to device a perfect plan to implement something new. How can we trust some leader with a bag of dreams and no vision?


During the course of internship, we had to prepare a two page document to propose some projects with a brief about the projects, methodology, benefits and observations. These are the stuffs that make you believe the feasibility of a project. Now, who has the time and seriousness to shape those big promises into great plans? And, why should we believe what we are asked to believe without any SOP or plan? An old saying says : “Beggars can’t be choosers.” This is what we are undergoing, we are being offered coins of 1 paisa, 2 paisa, 3 paisa, 4 paisa and 5 paisa – different in magnitudes but all useless.
Now, my coffee is cold and I almost forgot it. The sweetness and bitterness still co-exist.


Arpita