The Rag-pickers: We litter, they clean.

I am a fresh graduate, and I don’t yet have a hectic schedule. When I was a teen, I had all the free time in the world- to play, to roam, to sleep and to be entertained. I wonder what surprises would life bring ahead but all I desire, like everyone is pleasure.

There is however another class. A class that is deprived of what we avail. ‘Pleasure’, the word is a less-believed, hard-gained, non-existing factor in their dictionaries. Indeed, they have re-defined the word with ‘sustenance’. They search, find and share pleasures in finding concealed gold chunks beneath heaps of things that we (you and me) would hate to even stand by. The pronouns (their and they) used above refer to that philanthropic slab of the society that remains unheard, unspoken and unobserved. But, they unknowingly remain an indispensible part.

Meet ‘The Rag-pickers!’

In their dialect many words do not mean what they actually mean in a British Dictionary, instead they are substituted by harder truths. For instance ‘gold’ for them is not a rare shiny metal but anything ranging from a crushed plastic bottle to a deformed carton. How unusual and strange is the fact that the point where one thing becomes useless for one turns utterly useful for someone else. It is however hard to judge who amongst the two is a true user.

          We litter our compounds, they toil cleaning the same vicinities. We observe them from the insides of our air conditioned cars; they remain engaged in their art unaffected. Try throwing a bottle (after use) and see how they leap for it with a thirst of acquiring.

          The future of this growing nation are ‘we’- the educated lads or the growing entrepreneurs, who in their tomorrows would similarly inherit the same habits of spitting, littering and dirtying compounds from the workplaces to colonies. It is a habit uncurbed and ever sticking.

          As I daily pass by a heap of garbage hanging all over the municipality dustbin of our colony there is always a family- mothers and children, spouses, brothers and sisters- separating the useable from the real trash. Often I see them sleeping, playing and eating on the same compound. Of all the accumulations that they take home with the setting sun are litters that we had carelessly spread.

          No matter how they are and how they live, they feel important to me. What we can’t do, is what they do with so great an effort that even we would shriek out if we were asked to do. They live in a different world- a world where living doesn’t occur in brick houses. Where breathing doesn’t mean to be hygienic. Where life doesn’t have words like ‘career’ and ‘success’.

Do they have a future? Shall we always remain dependent on them? Will they ever shift into a house from their garbage palace? Who cares, even if they don’t!

Nothing would stop us from tossing a Pepsi can after use, no one would check us on spitting on a mall-road. Similarly, many actions will go unnoticed and so will be the later-efforts that these rag pickers would put in to clean our shits!

 We would just wake up to find somewhat cleaner streets, empty dustbins and chalk marked road edges.