The Newspaper Vendor.

India is a land of vast diversities – cultural, climatic, religion, geographical – you name it! The following narrative occurred when I had travelled by train from one part of the country to another.  

A new place and a different language and culture, even though it is within our own country, makes one yearn for the familiar amidst the unfamiliar. Unbidden, the audio and visual apertures open up for catching a familiar sound or sight. The same person might have felt, previously, that the vendors are an intrusion and wondered why the Railways could not curb this menace of unsolicited salesmanship.

But unfamiliar surrounding acts as the healing magic potion to make hawkers and vendors become a welcome intrusion, even with a selfish purpose. How devious are the ways with which the human mind processes the visual & audible clues to position itself in familiar territory!

The mind roams around, cataloguing the different types of hawkers and vendors – snacks, papers & periodicals, in the neighbourhood. Then it spends time on gauging the push-cart vendors with fruits, veggies and assortment of other items, plying their trades - down the lanes and by lanes of the locality.

In course of time, these mobile vendors were forced to become stationery and stay parked in a specific spot, on the street corners or at the intersections of a busy road – respecting restrictive trade practices. High rise apartment buildings, Malls in the vicinity, encouraging planned marketing on week ends, have caused the push-cart vendor’s utility value to nose dive. The push-cart vendor has been pushed to a “Just see if he is there, I forgot to get…” status.

The mind had almost finished taking a review of the role of hawkers and vendors in the society - still struggling to come to grips with the foreign sounding vernacular falling on its eardrums. Frequent travelers are not affected by this unfamiliarity–the first timers only suffer this “caterpillar on the skin” feeling.   

Like a hawk swooping on its prey, it directs the person to the nearest newspaper vendor (fixed or mobile) to buy a copy of a newspaper, in a familiar language. To get in to the local atmosphere, a hesitant conversation - with bits and pieces of the local language picked up so far, is attempted. Not to please the vendor but to reassure the self that navigation in unfamiliar surroundings is still possible.

There is a newfound joy in exchanging pleasantries, hesitantly in the local dialect - lacking proficiency, with the newspaper vendor to establish a reasonable acquaintance. As a reward, for making a conscious attempt to breach the language barrier the surprise unfolds the next day. The vendor sports a knowing smile and hands over the reserved, choice of newspaper.

Though the language barrier is still in place but now gestures, partial sentences and phrases are adequate to converse with each other. These attempts, at least have served the limited purpose of informing the vendor that the person’s stay at that place is of a short duration. The vendor understands that it might be for a week or ten days of newspaper meetings.

Happiness in getting to meet each other – not even knowing each other’s name, has taken precedence over the sale of a newspaper, as far as the vendor is concerned. The buyer feels the meeting was more pleasurable than reading the newspaper.

The day of departure drew close, leaving a feeling that a temporary friendship is about to come to an end. The so called conversational exchanges were adequate to convey that much to the vendor .With hours to spare; one more visit to the newspaper vendor gets easily accommodated. The vendor greets with a wide grin and asks, “Why didn’t you come in the morning. When will you come back, again?” He hands over the reserved newspaper with a little sadness in the exchange.

Overcome by emotion, the managed reply could not be anything but like this – “haan, ho saktha hain...jaldi hi latunga!”

On the return journey, the vendors in the train are no more an intrusion than a gust of wind on a sultry day.

The Poor Man's Pulitzer.

The news was unexpected though Mr. Me was secretly expecting it. He took pride in possessing an ingenious imagination accompanied with laser sharp words.

He even wondered at times, if his descriptive writing had real power behind it. The creativity in him asserted vociferously that if it were the case, it might not have been possible for him to put his burning thoughts on paper or a LED screen, literally burning them.

The secret longing to win the award for his decade long literary works materialized as a public announcement that he, Mr. Me, had been chosen from the short-listed nominees to receive the prestigious award.

He was certain now that some of the publishers would scramble to commission new projects or cash in on the aftermath of his euphoria.

Visitors and callers added to the excitement, which was raging like a tropical storm in his mind. All these activities rekindled the past memories of times spent in studying his subjects and gathering of choice words to clothe his thoughts. Every common occurrence or struggle of people to survive the day became the arena on which he staged his worldly dramas and melodramas.

However a sneaking disappointment hovered around the euphoria – his close family members keeping a distance from the writer in him. In the best of times he took it as a challenge to excel and when in low spirits, saw it as a cynical pessimism at his creativity. He understood, though creativity had no borders it had its invisible boundaries – normalizing with it came to him naturally. Whenever overcome by deep anguish, he recalled this wonderful sentence he had formed at the spur of a moment. He called it “creativity in a crisis”.

He was pleased that his writing skill has not become decadent even after a decade of digging for subjects and words.

The deep silence of the family members weighed heavily on his mind. Contradicting thoughts paraded through his mind – may be the mistress does not like the adulation I am getting or the son might be feeling the burden of sharing the views of the father or the daughter might be feeling left out in thought discussions fearing conflict of interest.

When sanity returned, he demolished these thoughts one by one – the mistress abhors adulation in any form; the son might have technical rather than literary liking; the daughter being a flourishing writer has her own goals. Yet the nagging disappointment kept bothering him, despite the family joining him for the felicitation.

Driving back home after the function, Mr. Me broke the ice by asking them, “why none of you feel like congratulating me?”

They replied with the following:

“You wrote about poverty using a rich vocabulary and never went back to that village or met the villager whose anguish you converted into money.”

“You wrote about social issues never failing to dictate what others should do with out ever trying to lead by example.”

“You wrote everything in a language which the subject person and a larger section of the population are unable to read.”

Mr. Me was left speechless and in the ensuing silence he recalled from memory all the topics and poems he had delivered with passion in the last one decade. He did not need his ingenious imagination to tell him that all along he has been asking people to reap without sowing. Belatedly he included himself also in the list, ruing the direction his writings have taken.

The euphoria of winning an award lasts for a short time, if the root cause for the recognition is analysed and understood in its proper perspective.

Yet his “creativity in a crisis” had not deserted him and he instantly recalled a repartee between a friend and him: Once he asked a friend, “why are you doing floor exercise?” His friend replied, “No chance for a fall injury.”

According to the latest information, Mr. Me has whole heartedly plunged in to social work in the same village which formed the back drop for his best-seller “Pain in vain”.

He had succeeded in bringing hope to the poor, raising literacy, health and financial state. He goes about telling people that the affection shown by these poor people is more satisfying than any literary award.

The writer in Mr. Me had come to earth.