Is this how it is?

A lifetime experience

Try and picture this: a tattered nine seater, with plastic sheets to cover its top. 23 souls packed into the jeep, travelling at great speeds.

I was one of them!!

As we ended our journey of the magnificent Fatehpur and Sikri we were in for a shock. “there are no more buses back to Agra,” we were told “ you’ll have to take a jeep.”

We were literally invited by the driver of the jeep. Apparently, another jeep wouldn’t be taken unless one is full and has departed.
We were shown a seat fit for a 4 year old and two fully grown adults had to fit into it! Five minutes into the journey and the kid next to me threw up( I presume it was because of the claustrophobic and suffocating set up).
Since I was brought up in a huge metropolitan and I’m currently living in another I’m just not familiar with such situations (which, I was told later, are very common occurrences). This got me wondering about how ignorant city dwellers could be about the daily problems of the rural India.

There were four people to the driver’s left and one to his right. The very sight of a person driving with people pushing him around was scary. The speedometer didn’t work but even a person who’d seen a jeep for the first time would know that the speed was well above 100kmph.
Thankfully, the road was in a reasonably good state, not a common sight in our country.
To add to my fears, it stared drizzling. To my utmost dismay, I realized that our jeep was without wipers!
Oh! God, why was I sitting in a could-be broken down-anytime jeep with almost two dozen people hanging onto all the rods the jeep had, moving fast without wipers and one light?
But a serious thought to the situation would throw up different questions. People there risk their lives every day, both the commuters and the drivers, to make ends meet. Is it fair for us to crib about car break downs or traffic jams?
A middle aged person in front of me was reading a book in that chaos. This is the kind of peace of mind they are able to attain which, I might say, is absent in the cities.

While I agree that the government should provide the basic necessities to all we should also realize that we are a lucky lot.
There are people who are less privileged than we are.
So the next time we don’t have a new dress for a party, lets spare a thought for those who don’t get new clothes for years. The next time we curse when there is a power failure lets think of millions of houses which have never seen electricity. And the next time we talk of larger numbers in the classroom let’s remember the hundreds of children who’ve never seen a school.
If not anything, this will bring us great comfort and satisfaction.

Raksha Kumar