Who are THOSE..????

It was 8 PM. Sun was still fighting hard to challenge my eye to look through it. I was sitting in the
patio of my apartment. Scrolling the pictures that I took in my last Golden Gate visit. In this west coast
of USA and in summer, days are quite long. One could see the dazzling light till 8:30 PM.
And watching the sun loosing its dazzle and get vanished in the horizon makes me little silently verbose.
My thoughts take some unusual route to reach some untouched part of my gray matter. I was literally
enjoying the calm evening after a day long meetings and long stretch of fighting with some Lines of Code.
I got a notification in fb. I looked into my iPad. It read "Yashi commented on a post you are tagged in.."
I unlocked it. Touched the fb icon. I could see a red '1' was quite purposely visible at the bottom of the screen.
But before I could touch that, my eyes were on an article which was shared by a friend of mine. It had few
random pictures and a line written in bold - "FOREIGN MEDIA NEVER SHOWS THIS INDIA TO THE WORLD..."
I opened the link. There were around 10 pictures from different part of INDIA. From Yamuna Express Way to Taj Hotels.
From sprawling sky scrapers to swanky IT campuses. From Glittering Necklace Road to Newly build International Terminals.
I stopped scrolling down. From few days I was pondering a lot on this. Its been more than a year for me in USA,
California to be precise. But in-spite of its ultra modern life style, I miss my motherland. In spite of all the
life easing amenities, life seems unattached. When I see people here, with their broad smile while crossing the road,
when I see people waiting and letting the pedestrian go before their cars, when the barber talks to you about
his understanding on economic meltdown, I suddenly feel that I am in a different world altogether.  Here people
have an opinion and they are based on facts and logics which they have explored. I try to think of India,
where still there are people fighting hard to meet their daily needs, fighting to keep the family floating in the
storm of crunching resources. For them being OPINIONATED, being able to think of GLOBAL WARMING, being EMOTIONALLY hurt are too much.
The first and last thing they can think of is - HOW TO EARN BREAD FOR THE DAY...
Now, coming back to the article. Its not that the India that was shown in that
article does not exist. Off-course it does. Off course we are among the fastest growing economy. Off course
we have come a long way. But there is one thing that come to my mind when I think of my India, and
it is - CONTRAST. I am not talking about DIVERSE, rather I am talking about CONTRAST.
We have ANTALIA, the most expensive private home in the world. And if we just move our face, there is DHARAVI,
the largest slum in the world. We have BANGALORE, which is very much comparable to the Silicon Valley here, people think big
and work hard to achieve something in the world platform. And we have BUDELKHAND, where farmers commit suicide in the
burden of poverty and atrocities.
I could remember these words of Mahatma Gandhi - "The soul of the real India Lives in its Villages". Now I am not
trying to say that INDIA of cities is not real. It is also as much real as it is of villages. But if I take
deep dive into the words said by Mahatma Gandhi, I could sense some strings that do connect the soul to
the villages of INDIA. So the question is - "SHOULDN'T WE BE PROUD OF WHAT WE HAVE ACHIEVED..?"
I think off course we should be. We boast to have the largest DEMOCRACY of the world. We boast to be the
bellwether in INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. We can admire our achievements in SPACE EXPLORATION. We are proud
to have the one of largest armies in the world. We are proud to excel our CULTURAL heritage and show the
world about the learnings of one of the ancient civilization.
But again, at the same time some different chords of mind stroked with few different questions -
Who are those, committing suicide because of poverty. ?
Who are those, leaving primary schools to support family income. ?
Who are those, forced to became DEVDASHIS. ?
Who are those, sleeping in the streets.?
Who are those, searching food pieces in the dustbin.?
Who are those, spending the cold nights without a roof above their head and without clothes on the their body.?
Who are those, lying on the steps of government hospitals unattended by any Doctors or nurses..?
Who are those, walking miles and miles to get a bucket of drinking water..?
Who are those, could not be even touched because of their lower caste..?

I know who all are those. Well they are our Sisters and Brothers. Our fellow countrymen. Why we need Danny Boyle to show us the
condition of our slums. Why we need FOREIGN media to make us pity on our social condition. We must not move away from these
and feel good that we have a different version of story also, which is far rosy than this, we have a different INDIA to showcase which
is not deprived of any of the world's advances. Its a challenge for us to work hard. Hard to our capacity, in whatever way we can to
contribute our part in its building. In the building of a nation where there wont be THOSE sisters are brothers.
We should just accept that the scope is too big for us as a country to grow.
We should not ignore the soul.
We should be modern in thoughts.
We should stop fighting pity battles of caste and religion.
We should broaden our acceptance level.
We should put our every effort as a country to eradicate each and every single THOSE.
We should do our part honestly how much we can do.

Before I could put some more thought on building my nation. It was quite dark and my phone blinked light "Amaa Calling....."
And my thought shifted from motherland to my mother... :)



H M Badruzzaman