Skip to main content

Watery lessons

A scene from the terrace of an apartment in Delhi

Water is the foundation of life. 500,000 litre water was brought to Latur in Maharashtra yesterday by train from a distance of 350 km and each person in Latur got less than one litre.

The cricket pitch and other places belonging to the privileged sections get water galore while the poor have to wait for the water trains to come with one litre of water for each person.

Delhi is one place which taught me that success belongs to those who can wrench it mercilessly by hook or by crook. Now Maharashtra is teaching us a lesson about water.

Comments

  1. True story. These days it's money that buys everything. Poor people can rot and die, no one cares.

    ReplyDelete
  2. We must become more mindful about water. All of us. This is such a frightening state of affairs.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As someone predicted, the next world war may be for water.

      Delete
  3. Lets do what we can do. I m taking up an initiative to plant trees in my neighborhood n avoid wasting water.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's the right thing to do: do what we can to alleviate the misery. Thanks for your contribution.

      Delete
  4. Water conservation is the topmost need of the hour..if we don't wake up now it will be too late even to regret!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I feel sad sometimes when I realize the majority of people living in the city like us are living in denial sometimes. We are taking what we have for granted while people from far away lands are struggling for such basic needs.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Grim situation...
    The future wars will be fought over water.

    ReplyDelete
  7. It is sad that the tragedies of the poor seem to be of less value than the tragedies of the rich.

    ReplyDelete
  8. You have great talent in briging forth the sensitive topics. In a nation where breweries are getting continuous supply of water, lakhs of people thrive to get it even once in a week. Really sad

    ReplyDelete
  9. Let us say it together - "Bharat Maata ki Jay!"

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Why India Needs to Reclaim its Liberal Soul

Russia’s Putin announced the demise of liberalism, America’s Trump wrote its obituary, and India’s Modi wielded the death as a political forge that transmuted him into a demigod. We are, unfortunately, passing through an era of so-called “strong leaders” like Putin, Trump, and Modi. A 2024 report based on a 2023 Pew survey found that 67% Indians endorsed a governing system with a “strong leader” who can make decisions without interference from courts or parliament. This support for autocracy was the highest among all surveyed nations and has increased consistently after Modi became the PM. Shockingly, the same 2023 survey found that 72% of Indian respondents expressed a favourable view of military rule. Indians don’t want individual freedom, it seems. We are used to the many gods who incarnated at appropriate times and destroyed evil ( Sambhavami yuge yuge ). Modi is our present divine incarnation. It is the duty of these avatars to conquer evil; hence individual freedom doesn’t ...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...

Being Christian in BJP’s India

A moment of triumph for India’s women’s cricket team turned unexpectedly into a controversy about religious faith and expression, thanks to some right-wing footsloggers. After her stellar performance in the semi-final of the Wormen’s World Cup (2025), Jemimah Rodrigues thanked Jesus for her achievement. “Jesus fought for me,” she said quoting the Bible: “Stand still and God will fight for you” [1 Samuel 12:16]. Some BJP leaders and their mindless followers took strong exception to that and roiled the religious fervour of the bourgeoning right wing with acerbic remarks. If Ms Rodrigues were a Hindu, she would have thanked her deity: Ram or Hanuman or whoever. Since she is a Christian, she thanked Jesus. What’s wrong in that? If she was a nonbeliever like me, God wouldn’t have topped the list of her benefactors. Religion is a talisman for a lot of people. There’s nothing wrong in imagining that some god sitting in some heaven is taking care of you. In fact, it gives a lot of psychologic...