वह तोड़ती पत्थर

First line of a poem by I guess sumitranandan pant .

When i first read these line I was too young to understand and anyway I had not read the full poem but when I got to read it a few years back I felt same the way poet would have filled.

A mother working to get food for his baby or sister for fee of her brother and so on.... but still maintaining their dignity in this big bad world. These kind of scenes actually re establish one's belief in indomitable spirit of humans. I have myself been witness to many such scenes and trigger to write this post came because yesterday on one of traffic junction here in Bangalore I saw a tribal Rajastahni woman in her full attire , wearing may be best chunari she possess, and all her bangles selling tissues on traffic junction.

First feeling was that there is a looming danger of drought as she had to come to work so far from Rajasthan, then disgust at politicians and local bureaucrats who would have siphoned the money meant for rural poor's job and in process throwing this woman to unsafe outside world but then a certain sense of assurance came to my mind looking at her confidence and her fighting instinct with life, like taking life from its horns.


A slightly different thing I saw a few months back when I was at Singapore. In one of the food courts at an Indian curry shop some Chinese guys were ordering food and when Indian wife made some mistake in understanding it , the husband ( also an Indian) taunted her in Hindi with words which only Indian husbands are capable of thinking that no one understands Hindi there. I cursed myself to have reached there just then as when eyes of the lady met with me I could see humiliation in her eyes as she knew that I could understand and hear what her husband had just said who was standing shamelessly and unrepentant.

Why Indian marriage is such an unequal institution and why parents prefer heartless arranged bridegroom for their daughters then someone who will care for her emotions


When I visited constituency of Ms Sonia Gandhi just before last general election ( I was on my training with a thermal power plant) . I happened to see a Muslim woman in her traditional gear with her daughter working on a field trying to get some remnants of crop for eating. It was a heart wrenching scene and I wondered why can't Muslim haters and Muslim lovers both see the suffering of this mother child duo. It reminded me of a story of a poor Muslim woman who feeds and spends lavishly on a distant male relative who comes to stay with her in hope of getting her elder daughter married to him but that bastard deflowers her younger daughter and runs away and local clergy punishes all three women on different charges.


But I would end this post on an optimistic note and this is from my childhood memories. It was the year of severe draught and we like many people in are had hired service of water bearers to supply water at our home from local well and this job was done by a Gujjajr woman. She was tall ( 6ft easily) and well built and could become a model if she was born in new york , had a husband who was lanky and suffered from TB due to working in mines, lived in a hovel in a community housing from old mill days of indore near the well. It was scene for my young eyes to see how fast she walked rather literally ran with two full cans of water in both hands, balancing her poise, her ghoonghat, her thick silver anklets, yellow chunari and white angles till shoulder with her confident strides when I ,pampered son of household (5 year old I was ) could not lift the bucket of water for my bath.
She fought with life and succeeded later I learn t she learn t reading and writing and got her daughter who was already past 10 years or so admitted in school. She made a house for herself at outskirts of city and moved there and since then I never heard of or seen her but in my heart I believe she must be doing well but that scene of that tall woman walking fast with those two cans and leaving behind a trail of water is etched in my memory since that time.