The Streets of Delhi

As I walk along jammed traffic on the broken asphalt of the Lajpat Nagar market place, I see movement but no stress. Everyone is laughing, talking amongst themselves, enjoying the buttered roasted corn that the vendor is selling on the street or the freshly squeezed fruit juices at the corner dhaba. The fashionably dressed youngsters chatting on their cell phones stand next to the withered middle-aged man who probably holds a BPL (Below Poverty Line) ration card. Delhi is the Indian melting pot where individuals from all socioeconomic levels interact on its busy roads. Of course, the roles of each individual are within the predetermined spheres our society has set out for them. Children who should be at school are instead trying to sell glossy glamor magazines with the latest Bollywood gossip. I see one child successfully wiggle her way through densely packed traffic, pushing these larger than life celluloid images towards open rickshaws, pressing them against the glass of air-conditioned cars, persistent in her efforts to sell pictures of the demigods whose names she can not even read. I see clusters of teenage boys smoking handmade beedis, their eyes lustfully capturing the curves of every female that walks by, accompanied by the occasional whistle and the sporadic lewd comments. I see three foot wide potholes and uncovered gutters on roads leading to arching monuments and magnificent malls. This is the India that is known to National Geographic, to Times Magazine, to The Travel Channel. It's a land of third-world poverty coupled with an unstoppable economy. This is the India that everyone sees, including myself. It is so easy to stop looking here and decide what this country seems to be. But try looking a little deeper, and you'll see something greater than a child out of a C.R.Y. pamphlet. You'll see potential. You'll see slum dwellers standing up for their rights to receive grain and kerosene by filing the Right to Information applications. You'll see IT professionals that left their comfortable two-story suburban Texas houses to live in a land they used to call their home, a land that many have given up on as a place where "things will never change" (it's a phrase that, to my dismay, I've heard much too often). You'll see people inspired by Bollywood's recent Gandhian-struggle-oriented releases holding candlelight vigils at national monuments. Things will never change for those who refuse to see the revolution that is slowly but surely taking place. The rest of us can help prove them wrong.