Creativity on sale

1990 was a mile stone in developing India; the ensuing decades brought floods of electronics, automobiles, and mobile phones with accompanying curse of weak nerved men and women who were to use them . This new effect could now be seen in offices, roads, homes and suchlike. A segment of India grew richer at an unnatural pace; this caused errors in equilibriums of society , which resulted in boundaries never watched before. Such dooming lines inevitably pollute the nerve of man on either sides of boundary.
It was thus that he, 52 now, drew a sigh of relief as the Kolkata bound aircraft parted with the grounds of Delhi airport. How painful and nerve wracking Delhi had become, thought he. Who could say he was living in a free India in this piece of land? His cogitation finding no check continued into memories of old times. Kolkata in contrast was perhaps yet in a little possession of the freedom of 1957 that fell in the lap of those who have been selling it since then for money. Oh, leave this old story; but come to think of it, isn’t Kolkatan minuscule retained freedom the only remnant signature in vision- in vision like a postal stamp with a Gandhi face in vision on a letter cover in contrast to sealed contents of a letter. Rest of India was like the stuff inside the sealed letter. He hoped it was a not a fallacy.
Then in Kolkata, when the HR officer struggled with the unorganized paperwork and admitted that managing interview of 42 candidates was driving her mad; when the interviewer came in between to say that he wanted to go home; when the candidates grew sick of unmoving things in the waiting hall ; when the interviewer interviewed him reluctantly; when later in the evening he found a long queue awaiting entrance in front of newly opened Big Bazaar in Sealdah, this bazaar, unlike small towns of Delhi NCR, being exclusive to Sealdah with closed down shops and eateries; when every person he encountered in Kolkata markets appeared out of business or out of job; then he admitted that freedom in title of Kolkata was indeed a foisted felicitation.
So he returned to his small town empty handed. His bag was not big so he decided to walk to his house near the bus stand. He walked saving himself from the typical hybrid traffic on the main road of the small town. There were costly cars, small cars, motor bikes, cycles, autos, cycle rickshaws, tractors with trailers full with loads of cardboards or sugarcanes and the age old donkey pulled carts with standing cart driver holding the reins- all on the same road; all not bothering this otherwise unusually mixed traffic. None cared such an oddity; it was a town of oddities.
He rose next morning in early hours. The gully below from his first floor was not much different from a stage of drama. Always one could see incompatible things happening there. On a 26th Jan, he saw 3 young men riding well bred horses. On a religious evening hordes of tractor trailers passed with people dancing and proceeding with the vehicle , which had lit bulbs wired to generators riding on small jury-rigged trolleys. This morning it was a battered old bicycle right out of some cartoon’s poverty of a newspaper. The bicycle was laden with rags in front as well as rear, and an old man clad in conspicuously rotten rags was slowly traipsing -so unnoticeable a traipse that even the placebo relief in an illness with an expired medicine would be faster in comparison.
Indian educated man is undulating between unemployment and work. In a spell of unemployment, when once he was killing time somewhere, he overheard the conversation of some shopkeepers in their idle hours. They were discussing corruption and role of some leaders who had started their careers from those rural swathes, and later upped themselves to national level. One of the shopkeeper finally said, “We all have deceived for our own ends. Which one of us has not cheated? All of us, you know, are like him.” They closed the matter , fell silent and looked what was happening around. A little distance away, two workers from Bihar in that town of Himachal were trying to roll a large concrete pipe by rolling it over small round GI pipe pieces. You never know when a set of rhyming things start together.
Daily before retiring to bed he would say to him, “Oh, what does it matter to me? I am a recluse at core.” But of late, his mind won’t keep from dislodging this for long. Like a corpse, it would float back to surface in his mind. A change was mandatory, he would say. Turn all the beams in the greater moment of inertia direction like before, that’s it. A recluse would always flatten in pulling this equipage. A man at the core was required here in this land even for the subsisting survival.

But how unnatural a thing he was being asked to do. They wanted him to revive his passionate creativity for their business. How could he make his passion work in lieu of money? How naïve it would be to try such a thing!