Waking up from Dream

I have always been an ardent and complete automobile enthusiast. I have done everything that a crazy enthusiast would do. That includes cutting out pictures from mags and newspapers (even during college days!), keeping track of new launches, admiring them on the road, watching all F-1 races with such concentration I have never blessed any of my classes with, worshiping Kimi Raikonnen and Ron Dennis and fine tuning my own driving. And automobile has been one of the fastest growing industries in India. Over the last few years, multitudes of models were launched, new players came in..

And obviously most of these new launches were in the D, E segments and even higher ones for which people have not yet come up with letter codes. With all this happening around, I had started to wonder why people still call India a poor nation. I mean, we turned down an India Shining campaign, but in reality, had we indeed started shining? Where does all this money come from? And how can a so-called poor nation have these many expensive cars launched and people to buy them in such huge numbers?

It was around the same time that I attended an orientation session for CAT aspirants. And just because they recommended kinda strongly, I started reading Eds and OpEds. Slowly, the focus started shifting from crazy words towards the issues they write about. Its about this time that P. Sainath became my favorite man of words.

Through his articles, I started seeing rural India, as it is. And boy! It was so different from what India Shining showed, from what I ‘saw’ around my home and office and from what I ‘saw’ on the road. All of a sudden there were little children in the most worn out of dresses and the emptiest of tummies trying to sell roses to Bangalore’s happy couples, weak and thin hands that came your way for alms at every bus stop,farmers committing suicide, one guy in every 31 minutes..

Today, I realize 8 hours of doing the bare minimum with maximum hype in an air conditioned cube is not what life is… I look around and those CCDs, KFCs, Forums, Mercs and BMWs fade away slowly into the thin air, with all those people in it. And I have NO idea where I, the one who fancied and worshiped them stand!