Andolan and Us

My elders and my well wishers keep telling me that being a part of such an agitation is a complete waste of time, that I should rater focus on my research and try to get my Phd degree as soon as possible. They tell me that I will gain nothing out of it. But the truth as I see is very different. They might be telling me this because of their experience and they may be having my Interest at heart.

But I have a very different experience, when I see myself in retrospect from the kind of person I was before I got involved in this and now, I feel that I have evolved. I was a happy go lucky kind of a person who loved to shop and watch movies. Most of the time I used to be at malls spending time, shopping, eating, and just having fun. I never had any real problems in life now that I think of it. I got whatever I wanted. I work for around two years, first as a banker then as a professor before resuming back to my studies. I always wanted to do something for the society when I was in college. My friends and I used to make plans of how we were going to change the world, but then we grew up and realized we should only think of getting a job to satisfy our never ending needs. Forgot of all those dreams later in life ,like most of us.

This andolan changed us,after being a part of it I met many people who wished to change the world, most of them were fighting their own battles against corruption. These people it seems had never grown up, they were still living in their dream that, little by little they will change the world. After meeting them and spending time with them, the dream inside me revived, I became that young college girl again who thought that she will someday change the world.

I stopped watching movies and going to malls, after seeing so much poverty around me it became difficult to enjoy the thing I had never even given a serious thought about. I could not pay Rs 50 for a glass of coke thinking that its more than what a poor man could afford to spend for his entire day and entire family. I started noticing the people living on the streets, talking to them and thinking that its not  fair that while some of us can spare 1000s of rupees for luxury items people like them cannot even afford to have one proper meal a day. Did they commit some crime? How are they different from us?most of the time people we see living on the footpaths are displaced farmers and tribals,they are displaced  from their own land for the sake of development  but are forced to live in extreme poverty. Who has developed from their displacement is not a difficult question.

Our lives turned upside down after seeing and noticing all this. My personal life too changed, since my husband was also helped and participated in all the activities, he too realized all this. We became bigger people, no more cared about the clothes we wore and where we went. All our troubles seemed so minute, actually immaterial .People don’t have money to pay for the medication of their dying child or feed their kids and we were getting tensed about our promotions, or raises? Suddenly all the troubles in our personal life didn’t even matter, our problems were all so small compared to what we had seen that they didn’t even bother us anymore. We saw a fifteen year old girl being sold for a thousand bucks by her husband, later found out there were fifteen more girls kept from where she escaped. Police didn’t  lodge complain and when they were forced to,by media intervention they just sent the girl to juvenile home. To this day we don’t know about the fate of that child. As the government juvenile home are one of the most unsafe places.

This movement made my bond with my husband stronger. I found a companion who was there to support me and who equally cared about the world. I saw an altruist; magnanimous person in him that I had never noticed before.

 It was a win-win situation for me. This andolan has revived my childhood dream that I will change the world someday. It may or may not happen but I will keep on trying who knows if our dream of a perfect world may come true someday.