Another Face of My country

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.