WHY am I telling U this?
For a month there’s been an unrelenting holler...
That the migrants be stopped.
Because if they go, the privileges would end.
No wonder then, yesterday’s propagandists have gone silent today.
Alas, there’s no stopping Small TOWN Joe anymore...
Keep Walking!
Carry on poor MAN ...
And let there be no looking back this time
WHY am I telling you this?
I have never taken sides with Mr X or Mrs Y. Or between Ideology C versus Ideology B. Because I have no ideology other than what I know from what I read, and understand. And that helps me make an informed choice of what I must believe.
And I ALWAYS believe that migrants must be allowed to return home, whether by foot, pushcart, bus, train, ship or plane. There must be a dignified end to their exploitation.
And we should not discourage them from walking.
Indians are genetically programmed to walk long distances. It’s always been a way of life.
We had absorbing stories and ballads and songs of dakia dak laya.
There are fascinating books from the Raj which narrate how, since the early 1800s, young British women and mothers would travel all over north India from Calcutta to Allahabad by steamboat, and then, onward to Kanpur, Agra, Delhi, Mussoorie and Shimla all alone on shoulder mounted palkis through the night, unmolested, resting at Dak Bungalows during daytime.
Why just that, the mapping of the world’s first scientific and most comprehensive median, the Great Arc of India, from Kanyakumari to Mussoorie along the 78 degree North-South parallel, was drawn by men walking great distances.
Even now we have kawars walking hundreds of miles from Hardwar to their villages in Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan.
And we have colourful marches during Urs to Ajmer.
Emperor Akbar (1554-1605) himself used to walk barefoot on Urs from Agra to Ajmer.
In the still hoary past of time, when the dawn of Indian civilisation was being scripted into a ballad, the Prince of Ayodhya made it by foot to Rameswaram and beyond, to Lanka all the way from Ayodhya up north. As did, later, the five princely brothers exiled for 12 years from Hastinapur in the riveting narrative of Greater India or Mahabharat.
Whether we believe in the historicity or mythology of those lore, is entirely up to our understanding, but the authors of those epics could never have beheld those elaborately vivid descriptions of the landscape without themselves making epic journeys in an age when no cart, no bus, no train, no plane was available to traverse the length and breadth of a vast and deeply forested landmass.
Through history, the raja and the runk (the army rank and the class rank in English is a play of the original Hindi) have demonstrated immense stamina and ability to walk.
But we don’t understand how that’s possible.
So, we shout and rant and scream and tear our hair at the great migrant gathering at Delhi’s border just about a month ago.
Had we carefully noticed, they had all assembled to take the long walk at sundown. During day, even in peak summer, travellers would rest and laze in the shade of the giant Banyan (unfortunately we have chopped down the banyans along the grand trunk roads once crisscrossing India and replaced them with tall water guzzling eucalyptus from Indonesia and Australia), in the caravanserai (caravan derives from the original Sanskrit chara, also spelt cara, which means, to walk/tread/march, and van which means, passage) and the ashram (the Sanskrit original actually translates to resting place for horses and elephants).
Yes, deaths happen on the highway. THEY DO!
But road mishaps happen even in the best of times. And that’s because of negligent awareness of the traffic dos and don’ts.
Mothers birth during long journeys. But every once in a while, even rich and educated mothers give birth to children in aircraft toilets.
It’s just that today, the poor still walk.
And the somewhat modern, moderately literate, semi-educated, backward-urban, public intellectual alone talks.
Much of it nonsense.
Either to get paid or to be heard.
And that’s how the false narrative is being woven by India about Bharat.
postscript: Actually, come to think of it, Indians walked all the way from the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia to Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and onward to Micronesia on the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the Earth’s oceans.
Can you beat that?
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