The Place called Home..

Its too cold out there tonight, in fact freezing. I didn't realize this sharp drop in temperature until I hit the roads for a 5 min walk for my dinner to my regular spot, at around 10. People wearing tight jackets, hands stuffed in their trouser pockets, muffler or any piece of cloth tightly wound around their ears. The all too familiar sight of winter around..  Its showing 9 degrees in Weather info section of my mobile. It's not that such chillness here in Pune was not expected at this time of the year, in fact according to the newspapers it had touched record lows here in the last 3 decades just a few days back. But it was also not expected that it's occurrences would be as erratic as it has been so far. Only 2 days back I felt quite normal at night to face the not so chilly wind in my Activa when i realized that I had forgotten to wear my jacket. Tonight it would have made me freeze in the middle of the road.. While it's unbearably cold outside now on the streets, its pleasingly comfortable here in my room with my windows closed. My instincts tell me to pick up that cozy (but not so thick) blanket, wrap it around myself tightly and go off to sleep or listen to some songs in my headphone and sleep off unknowingly beneath its warmth. But i had resolved myself a couple of hrs before that I won't go to sleep tonight before i put my thoughts onto a blog post.

Too many of them have been hovering in my mind for too long. Just random, slightly absurd, a bit logical, a  trifle provoking, somewhat introspective, even painfully sad.. just about every kind of thoughts have been idling in this mind in my spare time. I have to say I had very little spare time to allow my mind to contemplate so much. But its my mind afterall! one which i have failed to rein in as per my own wish for a long long time. Those long resolutions to sit down for a quiet meditation for atleast 5 mins for a start has fallen into my deaf ears and brain time and again. Before i let myself get carried away again into my wayward thoughts I better focus on what I had initially in my mind for this post to be about - HOME. Needless to say, for the past couple of months that's have been the most important thing in my list.

In somewhere around late August or early September, I don't quite remember precisely, torrential rains lashed the city that single day. It was one of those days when you didn't bother to carry your umbrella coz it didn't rain for the past few days, and you got tired of loading it in your bag, expecting the rain gods to sleep another day as usual. But the gods chose that very day to wake up and punish you for your non-persistence and rained at you with full ferocity. It neither seemed to stop nor even slowing down its pace in the evening when it was time to leave for home from office.I stupidly went to have a Wada pav in a stall just 10-15 meters away from my office and came back fully drenched. Thankfully I wore a t-shirt inside that still was comfortably dry. My friend staying nearby just 1 min walk from there urged me stay at his flat for that night. I had almost resigned myself to accept his invitation and come back the next day in that t-shirt of mine which was more suited for a weekend party than for attending a meeting in office, forget about giving presentations. But more than worrying about my attire, I sensed that I was getting restless about something, to return home. No it was not my actual home where i have the company of my parents, it was just a flat which i shared with another friend of mine along with some basic necessities occupying it. Still i felt a strong urge like never before to return to my flat, come what may.

And then it struck me. I could feel what a home means for millions of homeless people we hardly care about sitting in the comfort of our own furnished house. More than bearing a hungry stomach, which he might have got habituated to some extent in due course of time, it must have been much more agonizing for that beggar on the street to face a heavy rain under some rickety shade for a seemingly unending night. I see women cooking in the shade of a makeshift home under a flyover while their naked children crawl around in the dirt, men lying on the footpaths and stations under a torn filthy shawl, and countless of them who posses almost nothing. All of them have one thing in common, they don't have a HOME, a shelter to atleast sleep peacefully. In my idle time I must be thanking my stars every second, that I have been born with no worries about this one of the 3 basic necessities of man alongside food and clothing. Although a time did come in this past few weeks where i had to run helter skelter to find a new flat, since I had to leave my present one because of an extremely self-centered and selfish flatmate I have ever lived with. I don't want to crib about him anymore; have given him far enough space in my bitter thoughts than i should have, my blog will be blemished if i write one more word about him. Anyway, I finally found a more than decent and spacious flat for myself alone, although costlier but still quite affordable in my current standard of living. But for those who survive unimaginably poor conditions of living everyday this will feel like a heaven, for atleast 6 people!

A few days back on 28th of Dec it was quite cold as well when i had gone out to have my dinner at a nearby place called Jagtap dairy. While I was about to start my vehicle while returning, I saw something. Not a rare sight for any of us, but I couldn't stop myself of taking this pic somehow without any purpose..

My conscience didn't allow me to give away my Allen solly jacket to this fellow. I don't know even if i had made an attempt to do it if he would have refused it, not wanting to make someone feel him pitiable .Or even if I had made him accept it, there was no guarantee that he would still be allowed to wear it next day, the dark side of this world is not too kind as known to all. Nevertheless, I button-started my bike and left.

Have we ever wondered or even bothered to imagine how it feels to die in a bone-chilling shivering cold night. In tomorrow's newspapers, somewhere in the middle of it, in a barely visible small space there would be a few lines about 23 more dying in North India succumbing to the chill. Hardly a few of us will ponder how those lives might have been saved with a mere thick blanket for each one of them if not anything else. A government which can think about bringing about a cash transfer scheme concerning 100s of districts and billions of poverty stricken people in the country can't think of even distributing a few hundred blankets for the really needy as a start?! Why does it require an NGO, a spirited youth team or an ongoing NDTV initiative to help out these homeless people? Just like it required a brutal gang rape of that luckless girl to spark a much needed agitation that shook the so called ministers out of their slumber, maybe it needs an equally unexpected incident of epic proportions to raise an issue out of it. May be the Government doesn't find it's vested interests to be fulfilled by helping out these people who don't have a voter I-card to cast their ballot in it's favor. But it doesn't seem to understand that even with those vested interests if it reaches out to this seemingly uneducated, useless masses, it will generate much more goodwill and support on its side in due course of time. What can be expected from this elected people's representatives as we call them, who bother more about the security of the former president than the common man.

As rightly said by some forgotten old man, it's upon us to be the change what we want to see. Spending 2 and half hrs on writing about it won't change anything, someone might have just died out there right now as the cold gathers full steam at 2' o clock in the night now. We have to gather ourselves up and do something about it. Even donating a small sum of money or buying some little child a warm sweater wont burn a big hole in our pockets. Perhaps we can get inspired from the  effort put by a handful of people in TCS Chennai during their Christmas celebrations. They collected money from the everyone in the project teams and went to a orphanage for mentally and physically challenged people. They bought all their handmade articles and even gave away nearly a lakh Rupees of collected money to the orphanage. I can only represent them in pictures in my blog here and dedicate them to Aishwarya, the person closest to my heart apart from my parents, who herself was directly involved with all these activities..

And yes, as the rains mellowed down slowly I rushed for my office bag and got into one of those 6-seaters of Pune (all total 3 that needs to be boarded from Baner to Dange chowk!) and eventually reached home that day, drenched again, but in full spirits. Coz I was back home..