I saw a young
lady selling flowers near the temple. She had a small baby in hand, the baby
clinging to her, feeling the warmth and affection that no one else but mother
can provide. Remembered my mother, who wasn’t with me at that instant, for she
was cooking for me at home, with the same tenderness and care as always.
I took some time
to come back to normal after seeing this lady, and understood her conditions
that were adverse enough to persuade her to work and earn bread and butter for
her child. While the customers who were buying petty things from her did not
bother to realize about her conditions and continued to bargain, every word
that she spoke to take a penny from them were depicting the imputations of the
rising cost of living – an imputation of the political system of governance on
the society. This makes them parsimonious, no wonder and they spend their
entire lives saving money for the bread and butter of the day, for they know
not whether they would be alive till the break of dawn the next day and be
healthy enough to work for their living of that day.
As Oscar Wilde has rightly said in his short story "The Young King":
'Our master!' cried the weaver, bitterly. 'He is a man like myself.
Indeed, 'there is but this difference between us that he wears fine
clothes while I go in rags, and that while I am weak from hunger he
suffers not a little from overfeeding.'
These lines show the condition of the poor in our country. While the number of those who starve is increasing day and night, those who are overeating are not less. But the irony is that these "over eaters" do not wish to share some part of their bread with the starving.
I
bought flowers from her, gave her the money that they were worth of and were
demanded by the lady, and went away without speaking a word further.
