piyush jha

I was a seller of packaged goods. A snake-oil salesman. A man who sold people products that they didn’t need.

But, I wasn’t like that always. In my college years, I was what you can call ‘a concerned citizen’. I, like so many others, believed in a better tomorrow for all Indians. I had dreams that I would make a difference. Those poems of my youth were lost somewhere when I set out on the quest to earn my daily bread.

One fine day, as I was partaking of my daily dose of TV, an orphan boy from Kashmir called out to me from the TV screen. He looked at me and said “Are you only going to visit me on 2 minute specials on news channels”? “Will you continue to switch the channel even before this impassioned report is over”? “Am I ignored because I’m not economically viable”? “I’m not saying that I want you to revel in my misery, but, can’t you at least spare a thought”.

I brushed him aside like a breadcrumb. Laughing to myself, thinking, who wants to see cinema about the downtrodden? The ‘Other India’ is squeezed out of film. Packaged love brings happy smiles, and sells more popcorn. Reality is acceptable only if brought to you in a pop song instead of on the blow of a hammer. My days in the real world had given me the experience that the foolish idealism of my youth had bowed down to the taste of today.

But, that orphan boy just wouldn’t go away. Every time I’d switch on the TV, I’d see his face lurking in the shadows of the Cola and Chips ads, standing next to my favourite item girl, staring at me with those lost eyes.

I began to go back down the path I came. Like Hansel and Gretel, I searched for the crumbs of idealism that I’d dropped along the way. I went for a drive down the road that I’d forgotten and saw the teeming millions living just a 100 kms away from my urban abode. The great unwashed, the huddled masses, the people that are being swept under the shining carpet of new-India.

I spent eight months traveling and searching, till my search led me back to my own doorstep, where I found Sikandar sitting patiently. He spoke from inside me and said “Tell them my story, but tell it in a way that keeps them interested in me. Make them feel me in their guts and their hearts. I’m unloved, make them love me.”

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