Another Face of My country: Jalgaon Story!!!
A town with urine stink.....
that’s what I felt when I stepped out of the comfort of the air conditioned
sleeper bus. It was not easy for me to find a comfortable journey to this
northern Maharashtra town Jalgaon as there were no multi axle bus services to
this place. As told by Dr.Zaidi who was travelling with me it is a town of
bananas, cotton and Doctors!!!!
The town where people were
brownish and hard burned by sun and the agriculture was fully dependent on rain
or else the farmer should be rich enough to afford the drip irrigation. When
you meet any person the first question they may ask is are you a service
personnel??? A very typical slang used in this part of the world to denote that
you are a salaried employee. I think people all over the world can be
classified using this parlance... Either
you are salaried or a business man or else you are unemployed.....
The major and only thing that you
can find all over in this town is hospitals... I do wonder why... Are there
enough diseased people in this place to cater the business needs of all... I
don’t know... But I stumbled with the answer later... There were doctors and
doctors all over this place... Left right and centre.... Health care is not a
booming industry here. The doctors fight for their daily bread with each other.
I was staying in a hotel and was
here for a longer stint of 6 months on an assignment. So I cannot afford to
stay in that hotel room for long and neither my company will pay the hotel rent
for such a longer period for me. I need to find a house or a room to stay. The
best part came when one of my colleagues told me that I may find a comfortable
stay in a hospital!!!!
Yes though it came as a shock to
me.... now I am comfortably staying in a hospital ward of a nursing home like
many others in this city!!!
The doctor who rented me out his hospital ward
is also finding it financially beneficial to him as he was not able to find
enough patients to fill the wards of his nursing home. He has kept one room for
his consultation and one room for the patients to get admitted and have rented
out rest of the wards.
Now about Jalgaon:
A city where a person completing MBA
could not figure out the vowels of the English alphabet... A city where the
English newspaper is available only by 3:30 PM in the afternoon and that too
with an additional service charge of Rs.100 per month along with the monthly
cost... A city where you will have to pay Rs.18 for a Coke or Pepsi and when
you ask the shopkeeper “Why?” he will give a beautiful reply “Things are costlier
now”!!!
Being born and bought up in
Kerala; I felt I have ended up in a different world altogether. When I went for
a walk and stepped on human faeces on the road... my colleague who was with me
told “Welcome to Maharashtra”. A very dangerous statement to make!!!
This is another part of this
great country where the police men shamelessly take bribes in the middle of the
road for no reason but you are on a vehicle with all papers right. The youth
prepare for public service commission exams believing that they could earn a
lot with so called “Other Income”.
But I don’t know why there is
such a huge abyss exists between the rich and the poor. The rich still have expectations
like the upcoming better shopping malls and the existing mediocre ones..... but
I could not figure out any expectations for the poor. They are supposed to live
in slumps and are supposed to have stolen electricity from the public supply
and their kids are denied of any educational facilities or even the basic
public health facilities and are taught that they are supposed to defecate only
in the roadsides when India is talking about holistic and inclusive
developments. We expect the flights to be cheaper and common man using that
mode of transport more like the ‘Jadkas’ of olden days just because we have
opened up our doors for FDI in aviation. We expect the cost of rice to come
down.... We have all the foreign retail majors here... So keen to serve our
countrymen!!! We expect free electricity to all the poor families.... We have
given our coal blocks for free to generate power to all the steel majors!!!....
No wonder in this country a company which started off in capital intensive
power sector could breakeven in 2 years while world over any such company could
take 5-7 years to achieve that feat!!!
A country where the parties which
remain as the greatest enemies in their home states remain as the staunch
supporters when they come to union government to suppress the “Disproportionate
Asset” cases of their ‘Nethas’!!! Still
we say we are proud to have apolitical view and heartlessly laugh at those
persons who dare to move away from the views of so called anti corruption
crusaders to launch a political party and vehemently and patriotically vouch
that “I cannot keep quiet when my country is bleeding”.
I believe that they are not
having any colour codes for their new party and I believe that those who
believe and propagate Lokpal bill as a wonder drug for this country need to
awake at this day light where we see that the whole country is bleeding
irrespective of the so called promised land of Gujarat to the culture rich east
which voted for a change, to the sugarcane belt of the west, to the mighty north
or the highly literate or the proud Dravidian south.
It is time for a blood less
revolution when the whole country is bleeding in want of a correct and upright political
party which could give at the least taintless leaders and scamless headlines
for the newspapers. Not even a single day in the past so many months had passed
without reading the headlines of the newspaper with a newer and better scam. It
is the time we need to choose a right person in our ballot papers than to vote
for the least venomous ones. As a proud citizen of this nation I demand a
political party which I can vote with my heart.
