Open your eyes!!

India gallopping forward!! IT boom reduces the average age of a millioinaire!! Consumeirsm the new norm!! All this gives the picture of a country where all is well. Everyone is reaping noetes and spending it at will...But does that make anyone with eyes and a little bit of conscience feel any good?? Answer is no..Because behind those Dazzling multistoreyed malls and catchy headlines in the newspapers lies a glaringly different picture..
A picture of 3 feet high tarpauline roofed "houses" , poverty that sees parents abandoning their own faultless kids in the dumps to be either eaten by death or taken care by some invisible force...giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "Survival of the fittest"..a country where lot of people don't know a thing about enjoying in the rain because they are too busy emptying the water from their abodes at a rate faster than it is entering it to keep the infants and some leftovers dry...all in the name of survival.
But still all of us are busy, busy trying to reach a mirage. a mirage of complete bliss, a mirage of overflowing bank balances and position of power in the "society"...ever gave a second unjudgemental look to the toddlers in dirty clothes and runny noses with nothing but buiscuit wrappers for toys walking around on the roads or on the railway stations, a tad grownup kids cleaning cars and railway compartments with their shirts..with nothing but poverty written all over their rickety legs and begging faces; a face of india that we run away from by either half heartedly yelling at them or looking away. But however we may try to close our eyes, the pictue in the dark does not change.
"I give change to a poor guy everytime I see one". You do a great job, sure you do but is it helping, is it guaranteeing that the man gets a decent place to stay, minimal clean clothes to wear and minimum education to start earning. I don't think so and I'm sure you don't either.

The onus lies on us. When I refer to some passe way of thinking as middle class mentality I don't mean it in the economical sense, but in the sense that none of us are radical, none of us think different; as the largest chunk of the society or tending to be the largest as I speak, we have it in our hands to shape the country, not the blind rich or unable poor...but here is where the tragedy lies...a typical middle class man has his feet in 2 boats at the time..he has seen poverty so he strives to be rich and his whole life goes in earning just enough to provide a decent living to his family and chase a dream that he can never reach..the dream to be as rich as his employer...so this is where the insensitivity comes from...all the people on the busstands and stations belong to this class and they comfortably choose to close their eyes to the horrible picture of poverty and hunger which they see every single day while travelling to work and returning home.
So what am I tryin so say here..may be nothing, may be so much that it's not easy to comprehend in one go but it;s time to wake up, it's time to contribute to the society, time to give something back to the country we are prospering in..join NGOs, join groups that are reliable and where the money spent by people actually reaches the needy and doesn't get lost in the ever deepening pockets of the middle man...We the educated, earning and willing need to respond to the time. What would you answer to yourself when one day your conscience asks you, "Why didn't you help the kid when you could have?", "Why didn't you help that old man buy glasses so that he can atleast see clearly in the last few days of his fight against death that he is going to lose".....