prasad1
Active member
Homelessness is a worldwide phenomenon. But this article was written in India, about Indian condition. It can apply to any city in the world.
[h=2]India is a society where the poor, the nomad and the abandoned are waiting for someone to discover their silence. Today, silence is the secret untold commons of a forgotten India and our democracy will come alive the day we decode the silence of our majorities. Then, that silence will move from impoverishment to life
[/h]
I still remember this old man who sits near the red light, poised precariously on a pavement. He is prematurely old. He looks beseechingly at you as the car stops. He does not beg, he does not speak. He sits silently, quietly, exploding with questions and still watches sadly as the car passes him by. My driver, a folk authority on Delhi, told me that there are hundreds of old people like this across Delhi. Their families don’t want them. They feel unloved. After a meagre breakfast, they leave home and spend the day sitting on pavements, watching people, tired with expectation and hope. Their eyes speak speechlessly. There are no tears. They watch with innocence. The driver said, “I hate red lights in a city. They remind me of the homeless, the beggars, the old. It is a stop for all the people we abandon and forget.” He uttered an obscenity which described the attitude of the city, a heartlessness which had no place for the defeated.
I probed a bit more. A few days later, a friend and I were driving around Kashmiri Gate bus stop in Delhi. It was night. Men were littered all over the pavements, asleep. They were covered in gunny bags. A few had patched up quilts and were shivering in the cold. My friend said, “Homelessness is a strange world of citizenship. Do you know these people have to pay land sharks to sleep on the road?” Many looked distraught, too tired to speak. Some lay drugged in tiredness. One or two slept with stray dogs which added to the warmth and possibly to the companionship. It was a nightly tableau across the pavements of Delhi enacted in silence. Silence does not merely claim the poor. Its census of untold stories includes the old, the unemployed, the widowed, the defeated in every niche of society.
The sadness of silence - The Hindu
[h=2]India is a society where the poor, the nomad and the abandoned are waiting for someone to discover their silence. Today, silence is the secret untold commons of a forgotten India and our democracy will come alive the day we decode the silence of our majorities. Then, that silence will move from impoverishment to life
[/h]
I still remember this old man who sits near the red light, poised precariously on a pavement. He is prematurely old. He looks beseechingly at you as the car stops. He does not beg, he does not speak. He sits silently, quietly, exploding with questions and still watches sadly as the car passes him by. My driver, a folk authority on Delhi, told me that there are hundreds of old people like this across Delhi. Their families don’t want them. They feel unloved. After a meagre breakfast, they leave home and spend the day sitting on pavements, watching people, tired with expectation and hope. Their eyes speak speechlessly. There are no tears. They watch with innocence. The driver said, “I hate red lights in a city. They remind me of the homeless, the beggars, the old. It is a stop for all the people we abandon and forget.” He uttered an obscenity which described the attitude of the city, a heartlessness which had no place for the defeated.
I probed a bit more. A few days later, a friend and I were driving around Kashmiri Gate bus stop in Delhi. It was night. Men were littered all over the pavements, asleep. They were covered in gunny bags. A few had patched up quilts and were shivering in the cold. My friend said, “Homelessness is a strange world of citizenship. Do you know these people have to pay land sharks to sleep on the road?” Many looked distraught, too tired to speak. Some lay drugged in tiredness. One or two slept with stray dogs which added to the warmth and possibly to the companionship. It was a nightly tableau across the pavements of Delhi enacted in silence. Silence does not merely claim the poor. Its census of untold stories includes the old, the unemployed, the widowed, the defeated in every niche of society.
The sadness of silence - The Hindu
