The Potrait Of Poverty

The other day, while watching yet another movie on POVERTY, the one thing we don’t want to see, yet cannot ignore, an image came across my mind. The image is of a man, from an obscure village of a non-descript district in Chattisgarh.

earn rs 455 a month cross poverty line3 P1SdI 6011

The Image is not to dampen your spirit of freedom, which generally we Indians tend to revel in, in the 2nd and 3rd week of august, every year since the last 64 years. This is also not to discourage any of you who are reading this article from going on your next spending spree on your next visit to the neighbourhood mall or retail outlet. This image, however, is not a mere piece of fiction, and it does bear resemblance to all characters presently living in any of the five lakh villages in India.

Let’s call this man in my image, Naihar Sai (name changed for confidentiality). Naihar, is about 60 years old. That’s what he told me at least, though going by the picture one cannot help but put him in the octogenarian category. So, this around-60 year old man is from Beldagi Village of Lakhanpur Block, District Surguja, Chattisgarh. I came across his existence during a survey for NREGA in May-June 2010, of which I was a part in the aforementioned district. Naihar had a huge family when I visited his home. 4 sons, out of which 3 married, with an average of 2 children per couple. Comes to about 15 mouths to feed every day, including his own. A farmer by more of fate, than by profession, land is a liability for him, more than a source of income. The arid land in and around his village, can hardly be used to grow one crop per year, that too only for food crops like wheat or jowar and not cash crop like cotton and oil seeds. Now since he has land, he has to constantly save it from, encroachers and other prying eyes. Add to it, the already mentioned responsibility of feeding 15 mouths at least twice a day, every day of the year, more so on public holidays!! Under these kind of burdens, do you think he ever even gets the time to think about whether he would ‘like to’ commit suicide or not?? Naihar draws his sustenance from whatever he manages to grow on his land and also by working hard, even at this ripe old age, under employment schemes like NREGA, which give him an opportunity to earn as much as a hundred rupees a day, for 100 days. At 60, when most of the readers of this article will be planning their retirement, or would already have retired from their jobs, for him, life remains a struggle against hunger and once again, Poverty, the objective being to beat hunger in achieving the goal of feeding 15 people of his family. Naihar, for once, is not alone is this struggle, as he is joined by more than half of the people, living in all of the villages, across our beloved country. This is one generalization, which how much ever the govt. tries to deny, comes to haunt it, in terms of actual statistics, every ten years, after the census.

Now drawing inference from the picture, I would like to take the liberty of portraying poverty through it. An actual photograph, of an actually poor person, who knows how it feels to sleep hungry, how it feels to see your grandchildren look up to you with anticipating eyes, in the hope of getting some food to eat. And though this might look like a piece of poverty porn, which we have been so used to seeing in front of us through every kind of media, this is not staged, it is real for all of us to see. The smile on his face, the glint in his small fading eyes, betray the lines on his forehead and his bulging out veins, which occurs after a lifetime of hard work, and I mean physical labour in the hot sun, by hard work here. He is quiet, like silent soil tiller in PEEPLI LIVE, who was one day found dead, in the ditch he himself had been digging throughout the movie. Silent he was, in his death too. Naihar, too, will one day die, a more or less silent death, not being able to see his family come out of the poor conditions, which his father and his Grandfather in their respective times had hoped, only to die in disappointment like Naihar someday would. Poor in life they all were, poor they died. Silent in life they all were, silently they died.

However, Poverty and the poor man’s gospel have always been talked about with much brouhaha, at every possible platform, in every possible medium. From Satyajit Ray to Amir Khan now, Poverty has been depicted very starkly indeed on the celluloid, but what the makers of such films and we the audience have done very successfully over all these years is, giving the ‘poor man’ his privacy in his poverty. Not disturbing him, by bringing him out of it. And not letting our noises and voices of concern interfere in his silent life and silent death.

So, the question which I can’t help but ask is what is to be done now? We all know what Poverty is. How it looks. How it feels (only half the population, most of them are not reading this piece). I am not accusing the Govt. of not doing anything to remove it. There are several Anti-poverty schemes, which define and redefine poverty, forever adding new members in its fold. The formulation is there, the problem lies at the implementation stage. And why so, because we all are too busy, depicting poverty and celebrating it, than actually solving it. That is why, even after 64 years of freedom, we can find at least 10 Naihars in every village of India, who leave alone the freedom to live, do not even have the freedom to die at their will. Not to say, whether they ‘like to’ or not.

Before writing anymore on this abstract notion of poverty, that all of us feel that we are born with the knowledge of, I want to ask a simple question. Who is this poor guy, we are all so vociferously talking about? Is it our very own Naihar Sai or is it Natha Das Manekpuri, the farmer who wants to commit suicide in the movie? If he is poor, then who would you call desperate? Or is that, we would have to come out with a new category for people like him, and call them may be, ‘desperately poor’, much like the ‘Natha card’ being allotted in the movie to farmers who would ‘like to’ commit suicide. I really wonder, if anyone actually ‘likes to’ commit suicide after all.

Email : sarthak1987@gmail.com