One
could have easily misconstrued him as a member of a rebel outfit. His olive green
shirt recalled some memories from TV news telecasts with someone 'reporting from Chhatisgarh'. A small dose of fear mixed with some feeling of uncertainty arrived in my heart before I could take notice of it. I was sitting on a wooden jute cot with
Subhash at its other end. Small piglets were being locked away in kennels.
Almost every kid below 5 was draped in mud and was playing without pants. One
may call the area congested but not dirty. One of the reasons may be that
people would go distances to defecate, to keep their neighborhood clean.
An old
man and a few middle-aged women listened carefully to the results of oral test of
their children. Subhash seemed positive, unlike the earlier visit when he found
students performing quite bad on paragraph reading. Though Subhash says he
struggled hard for making it to 'Pratham' and harder to be good at the job, he
believes that efforts shall be made on 'fertile ground'. (Pratham is the largest NGO working on elementary education in India and Subhash is Pratham's District Coordinator for Rohtas.) Here,
expectations are the precursors to frustrations. But today, the ‘fertility’ found glitters through his smile. 'Geeta', aged 9, a Class V student is
able to read a paragraph nicely. Better than expected. Enough 'fertile' to justify to us the time and effort being put in.
I and
Subhash have teamed up to visit Mahadalit Tolas to promote the evening sitting
for learning of kids. A young person from the Tola is selected and is made
responsible for arranging sitting space and maintain discipline in the sitting
classes. Out of the three places, we have been able to run it at two places.
Subhash has learnt a number of tools to engage with kids by creating a playful
atmosphere. He creates the amicable atmosphere and then we do the sense-talking
with Tola people. The sense talking has already been done here. Classes
stopped after they ran for three days. So, we are here to postmortem the past.
Golden
paddy plants are down due to self-weight possibly singing "It's harvesting
season". Almost everyone from this tola has been engaged in harvesting
business since; since they don't remember. The old man saw his grandfather
doing that and he handed over the torch to his grandson, Sonu, a 25 years-aged
young man cradling his two kids.
Poonam
runs to see machine harvester. She is small enough to comprehend that the
way of her happiness is a source of despair for her family. The Old man
complaints the decrease in demand of Human harvesters. "With machine, the big farmers are able to harvest a bigha in two-three hours. Normally, one person would take
two days to reap one bigha paddy field."
Kids climb over to the driver's
cabin to see the features that they couldn't see till now owing to their short
height. Four kids have lined up. One jumps from the top of the ladder after
watching and checking carefully, allowing the one-in-waiting to follow the
process. This is a circus. Probably, not a circus. A circus brings happiness to
everyone but this harvester does't. I avoided falling in the trap of mental
debate titled “lessened opportunities due to industrialization” and focused on
the kids instead.
The
ladies shout at the kids. Here parents don't coax kids like the parents of cities.
Or if they do, it is a rare occasion-probably when the kids are grown-ups and
it's a matter of marriage. It seems that their shouts have produced the same
effect as a crow's caw, unpleasant to hear but bearable.
Just
few moments later, Sunil shouts at the kids. For kids, this is surely not the
crow's caw. It's raw, tough and harsh. The last kid has not yet seen the
driver's chamber, but he jumps off and runs to us. The four add up to make the
group larger, about 10 kids. Presence of Sunil turned the atmosphere grave, but
the tests and the instructions on education continued. The olive dress had
stirred up our curiosity. Our eyes exchanged each other's faces once. He
intervened to know who we were. It was annoying to ignore him, but we ignored.
Normally, a village meeting gets swayed in an unwanted direction if an attention is paid to a single person. But then, he was not a single person. Not
with this olive green uniform often used by paramilitary. We didn't
answer; instead asked him a question. "Can you read this?"
Pretty
confident, he replied: " Yes."
But, he
couldn't read beyond few words. The middle-aged ladies erupted in
laughter.
"I
can read the whole passage if you give it to me tomorrow.", Sunil
said.
The
laughter continued in the background, this time more members joining already laughing
ones. My cat of curiosity finally belled the dress question "Where did
you get this dress from?",
He
laughed, "From a friend in the police."
I looked
at the old man to see his response to the answer. He smiled. The laughter
of the people dispelled the smallest traces of fear. From my prior experiences
of visits to remote villages which had a recent past of left extremism, I could
say that extremism doesn't leave the soil of conversation fertile enough for
laughter. The conversations there are barren with suspicion, fear, resentment
and logic.
"Come here and sit with your books.", Sunil commanded. Then he ran to his house to bring a plastic sheet for kids to sit. Kids went to their homes and brought books and a dibiya. Few minutes later, they were studying and the Olive green-clad boy was the disciplinarian. Sunil promised to make kids study daily in the evening. Sunil is a resource, even if he cannot read or write. What is required in kids' routine is someone to enforce evening-studying habit and a disciplinarian would be a perfect match. This kind of solution seems sustainable and impact-promising. Two days later, Sunil is still making kids sit and study.
After
spending one more hour, we returned. In the midway, I saw some kids running on
roads with gunny bags in hand. I stopped one kid and asked "From where are
you coming?"
"Khet
been ke"
I
turned my head a bit backward to seek its meaning from Subhash.
"They
are coming back after collecting the leftovers of the Harvester Machine." Subhash said with a calculated smile.
"And
no one objects?"
"No,
the big farmers burn the fields after harvest. Also, the amount is very feeble.
The kids would sell the paddy at shops to buy something for their pleasure: chocolates, may be biscuits."
This
was not considered as theft. It was like the act of collecting mangoes when
there was a wind. Nature’s gift bestowed. Like millions of other kids, my house was also near to a small mango orchard that would keep us calling, sometimes in our dreams. In my family and neighborhood, even
collecting the fallen mangoes was considered bad, but I and my brothers rarely submitted to
those beliefs of our parents and elders at that age. Well, who first spoke the word "theft"? And who firstly said, that stealing is wrong? ‘Theft’ is defined differently in different social groups depending on their value system. Even in our childhood, we must be having something coded
in back of our minds, something pure (If children are considered to be) that made
the act of mango-stealing justified in our eyes. It was probably, the “right to
possess mangoes”. It was foolish like “right to love and seek love.” Even
throwing pebbles to collect mangoes was in accordance with our “right to
possess mangoes” which my neighbors considered ‘theft’.
For a
moment, I felt the “right to possess mangoes” true to the core, coming directly
from the heart. Then the mind reasoned, "Does every ‘theft’ have to be balanced with a ‘right to possess’? Does against every 'wrong', there are few 'rights'? Does there have to be a boundary? And what that boundary would be? Is the "right to possess" morally strong enough to justify the "idea of theft" on grounds of creating a society that seems to move toward equality?"
