The issues we talk of in cities in colleges, of love and of hate, of money and of fame, are these of any importance when at the same time more vital issues, more delicate ones, like death due to poverty remain hardly untouched. Today we saw a documentary, "Nero's guests", a film on P. Sainath's, rural affairs editor of The Hindu, coverage of the farmer suicides in Vidharba and the likes. We sat there, hardly blinking, hardly smiling, reacting to each subtitle, reacting to each farmer case, reacting to ignorance of media. The silence is heard after the show, I don't think I ever heard that before.
The government didn't turn their heads when farmers in large thousands turned their sweating lives into bloody deaths. When the toll,earlier slow accelerated from one or two a month to two or three a day. Farmers, who had a family to sustain and loved doing that, who gathered funds to educate their sons, who gathered funds to marry their daughters, to feed their fields got nothing more than pesticides to end their lives. The farmers who loving their families, were forced to leave their families on their own. I would like to commend Mr. Sainath and media men like him who made immense effort to force the government move it's b*** and come to the rescue.
Some cases were real quiet and moving ones. The one where mothers woke up at 4, cooked and did household work, caught a train at 6 to work, returned 11 at night; hardly getting time even to meet their kids. The one where a father, who was educating his sons by loans passed away, leaving behind his two sons who had to drop out of their first years. The sons, young bodies trying to fit in the wide shoulder clothes of their dad, are afraid of life, afraid of caring their mother, afraid of the loans their dad left to them, afraid of the death. The one where a farmer poet left behind his daughters, the daughters he loved, a box full of tears(read poems).
His poem, I think is one of the most beautiful metaphors I've read in my life. It goes like this as far as subtitles are concerned, of course in regional language.
' a bony child cried to his mother, "mother, please give me something to eat. I am hungry since last night". The mother lovingly showed him the sun and said, "son, I'll give you that bread but let it cool down a little. If you'll eat it this hot, you'll burn your tongue". As the sun drowned in the cool sea, the child crying for hunger went again to sleep.'
Did the sun feed the child???
I pledge I would never take the face of Nero's guests!
ReplyDeleteI pledge I would never take the face of Nero's guests!
ReplyDeleteI don't think we ever can. We can never take light from burning bodies.
DeleteI don't think we ever can. We can never take light from burning bodies.
Delete