The Rural-Urban Dilemma
“Seven days ago, I had been ecstatic, over the moon at getting my first job after qualifying for the engineering degree. Now, nobody will remember me. I will be lost into oblivion,” remarked Gaurav gloomily to Jena. “ I had promised to call up my fiancee to let them have a first hand information about my first place of posting. Trying to connect to the world outside this place seems to be an exercise in futility.”
They were sitting on the front steps of the graduate trainee hostel, home to the twelve bright engineers for the past one-week.
“You are right. This place gives me creeps. Ever since I set foot in this place I have been fearing about coming face to face with a man-eating tribal, who will drive his spear through my heart and then eat my raw flesh”, remarked Rakesh displaying visible concern on his face.
The graduate trainee hostel, where the twelve bright engineers from different parts of the country had converged, was located in one of the remote corner of eastern India. The twelve had been handpicked by a steel company for running one of the iron ore mines in the state of Orissa. The state of Orissa is famous for deposits of rich iron ore that are valuable resource to feed the furnaces of the steel plants of India and the world. The steel in turn, as the wise men said, builds the nation.
The train that carried Gaurav to Noamundi seemed like the one that one that the Britishers had forgotten to scrap before they left India. The name itself had seemed so romantic when Gaurav had heard about it the first time. He tried speaking it with speed so that it sounded like the French coastal town of Normandy, immediately conjuring visions of a relaxing soothing surrounding minus the sea-coast, of course. Till the time he boarded the train to Noamundi, his mind had conjured up visions of a romantic place, something akin to a small hillside resort that one frequently came upon in an advertisement in the travel journal and labeled as Paradise on earth.
Then poooff….The dream had been shattered into million pieces, the moment the train reached Noamundi station. The journey itself had been a revelation about the way the significant majority of India travels in the villages and smaller towns. Not accustomed to travelling in the general compartment of the trains in India, Gaurav had no idea about how dependent the poor people are on the general compartments of the trains for their livelihood, especially in the remote areas. The train was choc a bloc full when it started, with the rural population who had come to the town to sell their wares or on other work, crammed into every small space that they could manage inside the railway bogie. The friendly TTE was ever ready to accommodate all the passengers in the bogie for a princely sum ranging from anywhere between 25-50 paisa. Gaurav realized very soon that he was the only one in the whole bogie who had taken pains to buy a valid ticket from the authorized counters at the railway station. The villagers were carrying back unsold material, which made life interesting inside the compartment. Every now and then one of the hens would decide that enough was enough and with a full-throated cackle, would try to escape out of the bamboo basket. A turbaned, sun-tanned man smoking a “beedi” sat obstructing the entrance to the bathroom. He carried two goats tied to the ends of a rope, which, apparently overjoyed at escaping the butcher’s knife for another week, were trying to snatch a few guavas from the basket of the guava vendor. A quarrel immediately broke out with both accusing each other in the choicest dialect and would have got blown into a full blooded war, had it not been for the train reaching the guava vendor’s designated station and the vendor deciding to call it truce. Such and other incidents made life interesting during the entire journey and provided a collage of the rural India. The train continued to move in fits and start and Gaurav did not realize how quickly the time passed before the train steamed into the station.
When the train reached Noamundi station after a delay of only 3 hours from its scheduled arrival, Gaurav was tired, hungry, irritated and had already started having doubts about whether he had made the right decision. The railway platform where he alighted from the train was barely distinguishable as a railway station if it had not been because of the yellow coloured concrete boards with “Noamundi” written on it at either end of a slightly raised grassy patch.
Running to catch the company bus, Gaurav was amazed at the first glimpse of the mining town that was supposed to be his home for now. The colony was a picturesque little township painted against a distant hill-range. Yet, he desperately craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the shopping malls, the cinema house, the restaurants and the rows of brightly decorated shops that he had grown used to in his own hometown and which represented the modern face of India. He was disappointed not to find anything remotely associated with what he had been accustomed to see in a town or a city. There was a single movie hall which displayed a poster of a film that dated back to the 1970s. Even the entrance to the movie hall was so run-down and dirty that he wondered if people would really enjoy seeing a movie in such dreary conditions. The shops that skirted the road running from the railway station to the mining colony were not structures of concrete and glass but make-shift structures of mud and bricks with thatched roofs and tin cubicles that were supported by four pillars stuck into the ground. There was a news-paper agent and a shoe shop probably owned by the more prosperous shop-keepers amongst the lots because these shops were single storey brick and cement structures with the interiors brightly illuminated by tube-lights. There was loud music blaring from one of the make-shift stall that apparently was a sweet shop cum hotel, the small dhaba-style shops that one comes across at roadsides in rural India. The music seemed to be playing for the purpose of entertainment of the people sipping their evening tea and eating snacks in peace. The whole thing looked as if some film-producer had set up a set resembling a village fair for shooting some film.
The rest of the ride to the hostel had been spent with head bowed in gloom. In the hostel, which would serve as his home for the next one year, he had met others of his group, people who had felt equally despondent at the way their first employment place had turned out to be. The nearest township was only 100 Km away but the train ride seemed to take eternity and left them with a headache after accomplishment. With the telephone lines down for most of the time and the insignificant post-office not being able to imbibe any assurance, the guys had quickly realized that fate had dealt a cruel blow and imprisoned them in a part of India that was hitherto alien to them but was very much a reality.
A week later, Gaurav sat on the steps of the hostel, brooding about his future. He had an important decision to make and was not sure what to do. One one hand he knew that he would be risking the career and the happiness of his fiancée if he dragged her along with him to this village while on the other he knew very well that he would be shattered if she decided to break the relationship at this stage and left him to face this rural India on his own. He had made several trips to the post-office, in an effort to try and put a long distance call to her and tell her about the place. He had been unsuccessful in getting through as all the telephone lines were down and the post master had no idea when the lines would be back in operation. He knew that she would be waiting eagerly to hear from him. Somehow he had to get connected to her and explain everything in detail. He decided that he would try to give her an exact description of what she could expect to see, if she came to stay with him in this village. “I will leave her to decide what is best for her future”, he thought.
In the era of mobile phones and emails, he felt he had been pushed back by thirty years as he was forced to revert back to the traditional method of communication between rural and urban India! He began to pen his thoughts in a long letter….
They were sitting on the front steps of the graduate trainee hostel, home to the twelve bright engineers for the past one-week.
“You are right. This place gives me creeps. Ever since I set foot in this place I have been fearing about coming face to face with a man-eating tribal, who will drive his spear through my heart and then eat my raw flesh”, remarked Rakesh displaying visible concern on his face.
The graduate trainee hostel, where the twelve bright engineers from different parts of the country had converged, was located in one of the remote corner of eastern India. The twelve had been handpicked by a steel company for running one of the iron ore mines in the state of Orissa. The state of Orissa is famous for deposits of rich iron ore that are valuable resource to feed the furnaces of the steel plants of India and the world. The steel in turn, as the wise men said, builds the nation.
The train that carried Gaurav to Noamundi seemed like the one that one that the Britishers had forgotten to scrap before they left India. The name itself had seemed so romantic when Gaurav had heard about it the first time. He tried speaking it with speed so that it sounded like the French coastal town of Normandy, immediately conjuring visions of a relaxing soothing surrounding minus the sea-coast, of course. Till the time he boarded the train to Noamundi, his mind had conjured up visions of a romantic place, something akin to a small hillside resort that one frequently came upon in an advertisement in the travel journal and labeled as Paradise on earth.
Then poooff….The dream had been shattered into million pieces, the moment the train reached Noamundi station. The journey itself had been a revelation about the way the significant majority of India travels in the villages and smaller towns. Not accustomed to travelling in the general compartment of the trains in India, Gaurav had no idea about how dependent the poor people are on the general compartments of the trains for their livelihood, especially in the remote areas. The train was choc a bloc full when it started, with the rural population who had come to the town to sell their wares or on other work, crammed into every small space that they could manage inside the railway bogie. The friendly TTE was ever ready to accommodate all the passengers in the bogie for a princely sum ranging from anywhere between 25-50 paisa. Gaurav realized very soon that he was the only one in the whole bogie who had taken pains to buy a valid ticket from the authorized counters at the railway station. The villagers were carrying back unsold material, which made life interesting inside the compartment. Every now and then one of the hens would decide that enough was enough and with a full-throated cackle, would try to escape out of the bamboo basket. A turbaned, sun-tanned man smoking a “beedi” sat obstructing the entrance to the bathroom. He carried two goats tied to the ends of a rope, which, apparently overjoyed at escaping the butcher’s knife for another week, were trying to snatch a few guavas from the basket of the guava vendor. A quarrel immediately broke out with both accusing each other in the choicest dialect and would have got blown into a full blooded war, had it not been for the train reaching the guava vendor’s designated station and the vendor deciding to call it truce. Such and other incidents made life interesting during the entire journey and provided a collage of the rural India. The train continued to move in fits and start and Gaurav did not realize how quickly the time passed before the train steamed into the station.
When the train reached Noamundi station after a delay of only 3 hours from its scheduled arrival, Gaurav was tired, hungry, irritated and had already started having doubts about whether he had made the right decision. The railway platform where he alighted from the train was barely distinguishable as a railway station if it had not been because of the yellow coloured concrete boards with “Noamundi” written on it at either end of a slightly raised grassy patch.
Running to catch the company bus, Gaurav was amazed at the first glimpse of the mining town that was supposed to be his home for now. The colony was a picturesque little township painted against a distant hill-range. Yet, he desperately craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the shopping malls, the cinema house, the restaurants and the rows of brightly decorated shops that he had grown used to in his own hometown and which represented the modern face of India. He was disappointed not to find anything remotely associated with what he had been accustomed to see in a town or a city. There was a single movie hall which displayed a poster of a film that dated back to the 1970s. Even the entrance to the movie hall was so run-down and dirty that he wondered if people would really enjoy seeing a movie in such dreary conditions. The shops that skirted the road running from the railway station to the mining colony were not structures of concrete and glass but make-shift structures of mud and bricks with thatched roofs and tin cubicles that were supported by four pillars stuck into the ground. There was a news-paper agent and a shoe shop probably owned by the more prosperous shop-keepers amongst the lots because these shops were single storey brick and cement structures with the interiors brightly illuminated by tube-lights. There was loud music blaring from one of the make-shift stall that apparently was a sweet shop cum hotel, the small dhaba-style shops that one comes across at roadsides in rural India. The music seemed to be playing for the purpose of entertainment of the people sipping their evening tea and eating snacks in peace. The whole thing looked as if some film-producer had set up a set resembling a village fair for shooting some film.
The rest of the ride to the hostel had been spent with head bowed in gloom. In the hostel, which would serve as his home for the next one year, he had met others of his group, people who had felt equally despondent at the way their first employment place had turned out to be. The nearest township was only 100 Km away but the train ride seemed to take eternity and left them with a headache after accomplishment. With the telephone lines down for most of the time and the insignificant post-office not being able to imbibe any assurance, the guys had quickly realized that fate had dealt a cruel blow and imprisoned them in a part of India that was hitherto alien to them but was very much a reality.
A week later, Gaurav sat on the steps of the hostel, brooding about his future. He had an important decision to make and was not sure what to do. One one hand he knew that he would be risking the career and the happiness of his fiancée if he dragged her along with him to this village while on the other he knew very well that he would be shattered if she decided to break the relationship at this stage and left him to face this rural India on his own. He had made several trips to the post-office, in an effort to try and put a long distance call to her and tell her about the place. He had been unsuccessful in getting through as all the telephone lines were down and the post master had no idea when the lines would be back in operation. He knew that she would be waiting eagerly to hear from him. Somehow he had to get connected to her and explain everything in detail. He decided that he would try to give her an exact description of what she could expect to see, if she came to stay with him in this village. “I will leave her to decide what is best for her future”, he thought.
In the era of mobile phones and emails, he felt he had been pushed back by thirty years as he was forced to revert back to the traditional method of communication between rural and urban India! He began to pen his thoughts in a long letter….
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