Digging for Meaning

"Look at that. A girl smoking! A girl should not be smoking cigarettes." After watching a play at the Kamani Auditorium in Delhi, I was leaving on an auto rickshaw towards CP. It is the heart of the capital region - fashion, cultural, business & political nerve center. And the navigators of this nerve center - the auto wallahs, the cabbies - are largely migrants, who bring with them the medieval India's twisted ideas of morality. Its amazing how far apart the worlds of the navigator and his customers are.  (though not necessarily from different moral molds.) On the way to CP, we crossed a couple of college students and among them was a girl who was smoking a cigarette. Upon seeing her, a spontaneous statement came out loudly from my auto driver's mouth. The first statement uttered in the journey so far. He sees a girl smoking and out pops a strong moral statement that he felt strongly about. "A girl should not be smoking cigarettes." I asked him i...

A week ago I met these folks on the streets of Delhi, near Saket. 2 men, 2 women and a child. They were wearing clean clothes and they walked upright. They were trying to talk to people passing by but were quite meek so didn't always succeed. When I passed by, one of them asked if I understood Marathi. I said I did. It was quite dark, late in night & I felt that it might be one of those begging groups so I was cautiously moving ahead anyways. But their meekness, their clean clothes & them being Marathi made me pause and listen. I don't recall their names now. But I noted down one name that I think is relevant here - the name of the person who put them in a desperate situation - Rajiv Karade. According to the guy in white shirt, Rajiv is a labour contractor who brought them from a village in Maharashtra. They specialise in the work of digging earth for laying of telecom cables. The men & women had worked with the contractor earlier near Mumbai too. Aft...