Wasteful Youth

Saturday last week was my second trip to Jaipur in less than a month. The earlier occasion was to help do the CIO100 event, IDG's biggest event initiative in India and this time I's there to get my parents to Gurgaon. They come once in two months to stay with us but the condition is that they'll have to be picked from Jaipur. This time around, they're here for slightly longer duration to help me deal with Vasudha's pre and post pregnancy woes. Anyway, the purpose of writing this edition is not to narrate who is here for what and why! I encountered a very interesting person during this trip which gave me a fair idea of how the youth - especially those living in the rural India - are either misguided or have no idea how to look at their future.

Meet Vimal, a small but certainly a true representative of rural India, who due to lack of guidance or direction, lead an aimless life without any window to see where they are going to land in the future. This time, as I was driving Jaipur (250 kms from Delhi) the second time, I thought it would be a good idea to be driven rather than drive on my own. Secondly, I wasn't feeling well too (I was in the grip of the seasonal viral, which can be damn irritating during driving etc.). So, Vimal, was the driver. Vimal works as a contract driver with GAIL (a public sector unit of Government of India, dealing with Gas). He’s one of the 120 drivers that company hires for driving their officials to and from office. This is typical of India's 'Babudome' (a British legacy still continued) to be driven. In private sector, it comes at a cost and only after a level but in government jobs, its part of perks.

Vimal comes from a rural family residing in a small village near Kanpur (a prominent industrial district of Uttar Pradesh - otherwise a filthy place to be in). He is the only SON in his whole family (read Joint Family) and that is no less than an achievement for anyone in India. being a boy/male/son is considered to be so auspicious here that even today thousands of girls are either mercilessly killed by their parents or are subjugated to worse living conditions, which include subhuman conditions and substandard treatment. Due to this male child fascination India is currently reeling under tremendously erroneous male-female ratio that can distort the whole social fabric of India. And it is more evident in the North Indian states as compared to south where the better literacy rate has worked in favor of treating girls on par with boys. So, Vimal is a single male child of his generation. His father has two brothers - one elder and one younger to him. The elder one has 6-7 daughters and the younger one hasn't been blessed with a child. Vimal has two sisters too.

Because there's some awareness in the rural areas too about education, at least the male children are sent to schools (its not that females don't attend school at all but still the ratio is in favor of males). Vimal went to school too. Out of sheer anxiety and to break the silence in the damn car, I asked him, "How much have you studied?" "Sir till 10th," he promptly replied and then he took chose to take up a monologue without even waiting to breathe for a moment. It wouldn't matter to him whether I was keen to listen to his story. Probably, he got an outlet in me to whom he could narrate his 'not so eventful' story of how he ran away from his village only to become a driver in Delhi. He told his entire story in those four hours that we were driving back to Delhi and I, out of sheer curiosity, didn't discourage him to stop at any stage. His tale was a creation of an amalgamation of absolute rural upbringing minced with his 6-7 years of urban touch. Vimal is now 25 years old and not yet married. I was astonished to know despite the abject poverty of knowledge and scarcity of other essential resources to sustain in a metro, Vimal ran away from his house to find a life in this inhuman city. My mother knew that I was going to Delhi but that too was half truth. I told her that a few friends are going to Delhi and will come back after seeing the capital. She didn't resist. But I didn't tell my father or any other person in my family," he said. I was still clueless why he chose to run away from his home leaving studies and probably a few comforts and assurance of food, which he wouldn't be earn without undergoing tremendous pain in Delhi? "Sir, I felt exploited at home. As a young child I was quite curious to drive the tractor in my village (believe me it doesn't require to have a valid/invalid license in India to drive a tractor and especially in the rural areas)," he said. That habit of driving tractor for no reason landed Vimal in a soup. This passion of Vimal was observed by all elderly mails in his family and very soon he was asked to plow the fields in his village. This continued for some time before Vimal started hating it. "Soon I realized I was only good for plowing fields. Everyone would ask me to do just that. The tractor gave me nightmares - so much so that I even lost the battle on my height. I am barely five feet one inches sir," he told, with a grump on his face. But Vimal didn't stop. "Not only that sir. My father and his brothers are so united with each other that they don't look beyond a collective life. We grow a lot of cash crops in our fields but the yield we get at home is not distributed according to the labor that we contribute. It's the elder brother of my father (who is the eldest in the clan) who calls the shots as to what will go to whom," said Vimal. By now his tone had changed. What appeared to me as an interesting story a few minutes ago was turning out to be a calamity and Vimal was just a sample case (representative) of millions of youth in India who, in quest of life, not only loose their youth but also remain deprived of education, knowledge and foresightedness for all their life. But as I said, this was just the beginning of the ordeal which was being unfolded by Vimal. He proceeded with his tale and I was, as ever, again curious to know more. It appeared to me as if Vimal was just better than a slave/bonded labor who, despite having lot of wishes, are not given a single opportunity to fulfill them. The slaves, as they appeared in the due course of history, around the world are considered to be the most resounding examples of how humans are exploited by humans. This is not a new practice at all and specially in developing countries where a large part of rural population neither has land to plow nor has anything else to sustain themselves. Post independence the tradition of slavery may have slowed down but it still exists in a few forms. The poor, landless laborers are exploited to the hilt and there voice is suppressed if they raise it for their rights. Anyway, this is not the platform where I would deal with slavery and its impacts. So what Vimal said so far was giving me a feeling of how his entire family crushed his youth and compelled him to become a tractor driver (mainly to plow his field). "Sir my passion of driving a tractor was actually misused by my family members." Now Vimal was going all out to convince me that life was not all that good in his village. By now he'd shed all his inhibitions and was telling me everything as if I am going to act as a messiah and instantly give solutions to all his problems. By now I was getting a good sense of how, in the absence of any proper guidance, can ruin themselves. And specially the ones living in rural areas are more vulnerable than the once living in the urban areas. Although this boundary is blurring today (I mean youth from both rural and urban areas are vulnerable to threats of getting mislead by external influences). By now I had got a fair idea of the rebel that Vimal was planning and what would have been on his mind before he took a decision to revolt and run away. But imagine if he had trained his guns and energy towards attaining a level of education and tried to make his career in some damn field. In India, there are millions of youth who, despite having great educational background, remain unemployed. But that doesn't give us the right to decide against getting any kind of education. This would be the highest form of pessimism otherwise. Now Vimal was unfolding another set of reasons which prompted him to leave his clan and run away to be on his own.

"In my family, there's nothing called individual wealth. I have seen my father and uncles spending money on different things. We don't have any right to own individual wealth. I felt so deprived and dependent on them for everything," he said. Now I was smelling something even more rebellious. In India, we'd nurtured the tradition of joint families and common wealth. With the influence of time and the tradition of nuclear families (which we've inherited from western influence) proliferating into the rural India, this is an outcome, which was inevitable but not so solicited. If I have to believe Vimal and the likes of him, they all are vying for their personal wealth bank. It may not be very dangerous but it certainly takes us away from the values of history, wherein we were more prone to common wealth and united families.

"Sir, I wanted to earn money for myself, at best for my core family. I told my mother very clearly that I can live in poverty but can't see the unequal distribution of wealth," said Vimal.

That brought him to Delhi. Although he was not a dumb ass to come to Delhi without any platform to fall back upon but the end result and the great message hidden in this story is to know how badly our youth wastes its potential. Today Vimal lives in a small one room set paying close to 1/4th of his salary towards rent. He pays another 1/4th of his salary to feed himself (that's food) and some more expenses here and there would see him spending his entire salary in just sustaining himself. But he is slightly more intelligent that I thought he would be. As a contract driver he works for five days a week and the two days of weekend are his own. Though killing his instinct, Vimal prefers to work on weekends for his small set of clientele, which includes me as well. As part of this deal, he earns an additional sum of money and saves his salary for good. By the time this story got to an end, we were already entering the hustle bustle of the bust express highway. Vimal concentrated on driving and I was occupied thinking something else. We reached home, I paid Vimal his due and the story ended there. But I can say it with great conviction that millions of youth in India are following what Vimal did - escaping the tough route to get isolated and get lost in the crowd of millions just for a fake experience of freedom and independence.