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I pass through this
very intersection every morning with so much ease. Today, the pace is skewed.
There is a sense of disarray as motorists try to push past each other through
the traffic light. The light here always tests their agility because if you miss
the green, you have to wait for another three minutes before it lets you go past
again. Those three minutes
become eternity for an otherwise time-insensitive nation on the move. Today, there
is a sense of chaos here. People are honking, skirting each other and rushing
past. I look out of my window to seek the reason. It is not difficult to find
because it is lying strewn all over the place. A
tomato seller's cart has overturned. There
are tomatoes everywhere and the rushing motorists are making pulp of it. The man
is trying to get his cart back on its four rickety wheels and a few passersby
are picking up what they can in an attempt to save him total loss. Though
symbolic in the larger scheme of things, it is not a substantive gesture. His
business for the day is over.The way this man's economics works is very simple.
There is a money lender who lends him money for just one day, at an interest rate
of Rs 10 per day per Rs 100 lent. With
the money, he wakes up at 4 am to go to the wholesale market for vegetables. He
returns, pushing his cart a good five miles, and by 7 am when the locality wakes
up, he is ready to sell his day's merchandise. By the end of the morning, some
of it remains unsold. This his wife
sells by the afternoon and takes home the remainder, which becomes part of his
meal. With the day's proceeds, he returns the interest to the money lender
and goes back to the routine the next day. If
he does not sell for a day, his chain breaks. Where does he go from here? He
goes back to the money lender, raises capital at an even more penal interest and
gets back on his feet. This is not the only time that destiny has upset his tomato
cart. This happens to him at least six times every year. Once
he returned with a loaded cart of ripe tomatoes and it rained heavily for the
next three days. No one came to the market and his stock rotted in front of his
own eyes. Another time, instead of the weather, it was a political rally that
snowballed into a confrontation between two rival groups and the locality closed
down. And he is not alone in this game of extraneous factors that seize not
only his business but also his life. He
sees this happen to the "gol-gappa" seller, the peanut seller and the
"vada pao" seller all the time. When their product does not sell, it
just turns soggy.Sometimes they eat some of it. But how much of that stuff can
you eat by yourself? So, they just
give away some and there is always that one time when they have to simply throw
it away. Away from the street-vendor selling perishable commodity with little
or no life support system, the corporate world is an altogether different place.
Here we have some of the most educated
people in the country. We don the best garbs. We do not have to push carts; our
carts push us. We have our salary, perquisites, bonuses, stock options, gratuities,
pensions and our medical insurance and the group accident benefit schemes. Yet,
all the while, we worry about our risks and think about our professional insecurity.
We wonder, what would happen if the
company shifted offices to another city? What would happen if the department
closed down? What would happen if you were to take maternity leave and the temporary
substitute delivered better work than you did? What
would happen if the product line you are dealing with simply failed? In any
of those eventualities, the worst that could happen would still be a lot less
than having to see your cartful of tomatoes getting pulped under the screeching
wheels of absolute strangers who have nothing personal against you. All
too often we exaggerate our risks. We
keep justifying our professional concerns till they trap us in their vicious downward
spiral. Devoid of education, sophisticated reasoning and any financial safety
net, the man with the cart is often able to deal with life much better than many
of us. Is it time to look out of the window, into the eyes of that man to ask
him, where does he get it from? In his simple stoicism, is probably, our lost
resilience.
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