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.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Kishor KApril 13, 2016 at 9:41 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  2. KalpanaApril 13, 2016 at 3:24 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 13, 2016 at 8:35 PM

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

      Delete
  3. Roohi BhatnagarApril 14, 2016 at 9:24 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalApril 14, 2016 at 7:45 PM

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

      Delete
  4. Amit AgarwalApril 14, 2016 at 12:06 PM

    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. TesApril 15, 2016 at 11:29 AM

    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. Anita SabatApril 15, 2016 at 11:57 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  7. SeenaApril 17, 2016 at 10:01 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  8. Rakhi JayashankarApril 18, 2016 at 7:56 AM

    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. Titas BiswasApril 18, 2016 at 11:13 AM

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

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
19 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more

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
37 comments
Read more