Suman K. Sharma
It is a sunny Sunday. Voices of children singing in unison seep sweetly out of the top floor of a sprawling mansion in the posh colony of Chhanni Himmat. The iron gate is invitingly open – and surprise of surprises – there is no ferocious dog anywhere near the entrance. The ornate marble stairs lead up to a spacious hall. On a wall-to-wall carpet sit boys and girls in neat rows, some thirty five in all. A young woman in her twenties is giving them instructions in the style of a loving didi and the young ones listen to her, their well scrubbed and gleaming faces rapt in attention. At some distance from the didi sits cross-legged a portly man who from his demeanour could only be the master of the house. His spectacled wife is standing among the children, ready to help should anyone present need it.
It is a session of baal sanskar. The participants are from the families of the migrant workers. The lady instructor is a volunteer from a national-level socio religious organization. The objective is to impart cultural values to the children from deprived families, give them actionable advice on how to improve their health and grades and significantly, to see if one or more of them can be recommended to be sponsored for financial help in their studies. After a delectable session of interactive tutelage, the youngsters are given light refreshments and sent off to their homes in good cheer. The children will come again next Sunday, bringing with them more of their peers and chums.
What has prompted this sixty-year old man and his wife to host such an activity in their plush residence? He narrates his story in a self-effacing manner, punctuating it with little laughs and witticisms. “I was born in the shadow of death,” he begins, “my father having died a month earlier.” His mother, in her twenties, had been married hardly a year then. She named the newborn ‘A-shok’ – one who takes away grief. But it was rather a sordid life both for the young widow and her only son. They had a one-room quarter in Bakshinagar for residence, weepy widows (theirs was literally a widows’ neighbourhood) for company and a teacher’s salary to thrive on. The mother, despite her meager income, never stinted in helping out her needy neighbours, be it in cash, or in kind.
When Ashok grew up, he started supplementing his mother’s income by joining a private school as a teacher, giving tuitions and so forth. In time, he landed himself a regular job with a nationalized bank and got married into a rich family. With marriage came ambition. He wanted now to earn enough so he could stand on equal terms with the rich. The family opened a school. Renting out shops, it cashed in on the corner location of the house and made canny transactions to bolster up its finances. The school flourished; the family got bigger – it had three strapping children – and the house got smaller in proportion. They moved on to Chhanni Himmat for a much bigger house. The bank job which had carried with it the Damocles’ sword of all-India transferability was increasingly becoming an obstruction to the furtherance of Ashok’s choice projects at home and he availed of the bank’s scheme of voluntary retirement. This gave him time enough vigorously to fulfil his ambition. A focused man, it did not take him long to consolidate his financial position – little wonder that ‘tangible’ is a favourite word in his vocabulary. Luck also favoured him. Both his sons got themselves good jobs and the daughter – an MBA – embarked upon her own successful business venture.
This July he turned sixty and sat wondering. He had had his races. Success had not eluded him. But where would he go from here? He might have forty, twenty, five years more to go, or even as short a period as twenty days left to him. Would he spend this precious time having kitty parties or splurging hard earned money in hotels and restaurants? Then it struck him. Bring a smile to a fellow human being and you will have earned yourself a bigger smile. Distribute happiness among others and it will return to you manifolds. He still likes to make money, for, as he says ‘money is power to do things, things I want to do in my life.’ Money for him is not an end in itself but a means to achieve an end.
The gleam of the subtle joy on the faces of those three score and five children in that hall makes his point clear. Tomorrow, many of these children would shed the constraints of their penury and make themselves capable of helping out their less fortunate brethren.
Ashok is an aam admi turning khas – a happy metaphor for the middle class. Let the law makers churn out, if they find time enough from their shenanigans, laws for social welfare and let the bureaucrats implement those laws at least on paper; but at the end of the day it is the endeavour of ‘A-shok’ that pulls the have-nots from the morass of poverty. May a thousand Ashoks thrive!
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