Pocha Wala

I moved into a new apartment this week, and my mother’s obsession with perfection, which i seem to have acquired, drove her to make quite a few changes around the the place. Around 4:00 in the evening, yestarday, I overheard a conversation that intrigued me enough to write of it. It was a boy who worked in the housekeeping department, barely seventeen, he had been summonned, to do what he did for a living, he was a cleaner, a Pocha-wala if you will, and the most interesting one yet.

He worked, cleaning washrooms at a banquets place by day, and went to a “Night College” by night. And much like a student’s rendition of the ‘Rocky’ series, this rather scrawny Rocky Balboa, had defeated his demons and triumphed over his opponents to be one of the best of his time. A staggering 98% in his HSC Board examinations, is what he managed with nothing but pure, unadulterated desire. I struggle to accomplish the same with all the resources a student could ever need, it made me feel rather useless for more than just a moment.

The perfectly heartbreaking anticlimax to this inspirational titbit, is the fact that when asked what he plans to study further he says “Majboori hai, job karlunga”. Not because he doesn’t want to, not because he has no ambitions, he clearly isn’t lazy, so what can stop him from realising his academic and professional desires? The one thing created in the image of revolutionaries and the one thing with power like no other to solve worldly problems, also the one thing that ends up causing a lot of them in the first place- money. He, like thousands of others, with double the percentage that students fathered by people with ‘influence’ get into the best of colleges with, will settle for much less than what he could be. An immediate and absolute heir to the throne, exiled to the shadows for an eternity, because his shoulders must carry the weight of the debt that his family has accumulated, or the responsibility of earning for a family of five, or to get himself into ‘better’ conditions, whatever the case may be, India loses out on yet another one of its best and brightest.

Survival of the fittest in human terms, no more means the survival of the physically or intellectually proficient, a chunk of it now rests on pure probability, whether or not you are born, heir to a sufficient amount of financial power. Which means soon, our ‘fittest’ will not be highly intellectual beings, nor will they be physically powerful, they will, though, have the power to swim in their liquid assets at their whims and fancies. This spells downfall for the human race, a very literal, retard apocalypse, as they eventually will, march on in their haphazard ways, squashing the brightest of the world beneath their feet.