Tvlesion

The Television looked dusty and weather worn, like It had lived in a mud house among aluminum utensils, firewood stoves, cloth cradles and desperation; providing the only window into a world that appeared to offer a vision that something better existed elsewhere for someone and perhaps one day for the inhabitants of the mud house too. If those visions were real, there might have been hope.
By the TV stood various household equipment that humans collect by any means. Flat brown mattresses rolled up like beedis, parts of chairs tied up with string and rope, anonymous jute bags and Chinese fertilizer sacks made of viscose hiding unabandonable items whose worth could only be understood by the one who labored hard to procure them through debt or savings to fill a seemingly urgent need sometime in the past, but were pure baggage which had to be lugged around now. Can't get rid of them, no use in keeping them; dead weight covered in dust.
A woman sat on the railway platform guarding this sordid debris of the industrial revolution. She wore clean clothes and looked proud; whether of herself or her belongings or her having been able at some point to procure these things it wasn't clear. Not nearly as clear as her eyes.
As the train slowly eased its way out of Ongole's only railway station the heat hit like a sickle, sharp and shining.
As I continued to stand at the door to the compartment, fields of what might once have been fertile land passed by in various stages of drying up under the heat of the unrelenting Andhra sun. The sky was a mixture of blue and grey; a sickly industrial sort of globalised air. But for that TV there might have been just a little bit more of blue and the proud woman might have done something a little more fulfilling than watching unreal images of unattainable glamour and avarice.
A group of young and well fed youth stood behind me chatting in a foreign tongue. They looked proud too. They perhaps did not wait until their TVs gathered dust or their mattresses became flat; they bought a new one every 6 months. One of them finished a Coca-Cola® and threw the empty plastic bottle into the wash basin with what seemed like contempt.
The proud woman lugs her television around to guide her in raising her child so that he may one day buy numerous television sets and throw empty coke bottles into public wash basins with contempt.
What an enlightened age we live in, when the petty goals of the decadent are forced down the throats of the poor and sincere.
They have nowhere to run. Even when they run, they carry their Televisions with them.

09-June-2009 - Bangalore to Guwahati (Ongole)