The lady with a beautiful dream

During school and college, we didn’t have a car or a two wheeler. We used to shuttle by bus between Guwahati and Hajo, my native place. My friends from that area will surely know the plight of the bus passengers travelling in the Guwahati-Hajo-Nalbari-Barpeta route. The roads are bumpy. The wise handyman will never clap the body of the bus to signal the driver to press the accelerator till passengers are stacked like the betel leaves. During summer, in the bus we could practically smell the food taken by the passengers  prior to boarding the bus.

Life has changed a lot in the last sixteen years after I did my Engineering. I drive a car and in the changed lifestyle find hard to adjust in a crowded bus coupled with all the associated hustle bustle. At office, I break my head in finding innovative ideas for energy conservation while I engage a four wheeler all the time for use of a solitary person. So during my last visit to Hajo, reminiscence of the old days prompted me to take a public bus ride from the airport.

Like any other day, the afternoon bus from Jalukbari to Hajo was crowded. I didn’t get a seat and struggled to avoid going off balance by clutching tightly to a seat. Number of vehicles has gone up many folds in this area but so are the passengers. I had travelled innumerable times in this route during my college days. Many times, my bus fare was borne by some generous co-passengers who knew my father well. Even some of them forcibly paid me the onward rickshaw fare. With little apparent reticence, I gladly accepted all those generosity. Only the resident engineering students can appreciate the precarious financial hardship we went through in those days.

Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy the bus ride and cursed myself for the adventure till I overheard the conversation of those two ladies who returned home after a tiring day. From the accent and feature, they seemed to belong to the immigrant community and looked trampled by poverty and hard work. But the words of one lady made my entire bus ride of forty odd minutes meaningful. Her husband had left her and three children after talaq to live with another woman. As she told the other lady about her struggle to get education for her children and their academic accomplishments, her voice choked in emotion and pride. No matter how much she endures, she will make sure that her three bright children have a dignified life through education. 

To me, that lady is the epitome of a rising India who wants to change life through education which alone can transform the future of this great country of once. In the twenty first century, destiny of India will not be written by the upper 30 percent of our society but those 70% who today stumble to afford two square meals a day. I have seen extremely talented children in the remote corners who need little care and grooming to grow wings to fly. With time, many of them will fade away till the right kind of infrastructure reaches them. But no matter how many bills are introduced in the Parliament, how many schemes are finalized, without the spread of meaningful education and infrastructure development, uneducated and unemployed mass will expand in the twenty first century India racing far ahead of the government freebies and create tremors to rock the foundation of this country. That leaves the Planning Commission toil even harder in doing arithmetic calculation to lower the cut off income to distinguish the poverty line! 

They need little care & grooming to grow wings to fly

During my childhood, perhaps hundreds of times, I heard this story. One of our relation and ancestors, Late Holiram Medhi left home in late nineteenth century to join the school established by the Jaminder of Gauripur which used to provide free education. It was an incredible event and decision of a village teenager who defied the traditional wisdom of those days. Latter on, late Medhi was appointed by the British as an Extra Assistant Commissioner. Sequences of the story of the young boy’s adventurous trip to Gauripur changed as it was told and retold but the crux of the story remained the same. Holiram Medhi's desire for education might have inspired many future generations of our locality and a number of times I was reminded that I didn’t have the liberty to become an exception in the twentieth Century.

May be without that adventurous trip of Late Holiram Medhi, today I would have still remained glued to the plough and a pair of bulls under the scorching sun.