Apples and Power

30 April 2012

I will never forget the taste of that apple..

I chewed almost through it’s bone and savoured each bite as the most precious delicacy, crunchy and juicy in this dry desert road. As I threw what remained of it and a steady bird fetched it, I realized I had never eaten so much of an apple; Even if I flatter myself with the perception of being a socially conscious person, I had never once in my life appreciated a simple fruit of nature this way.

Desert Delicacies

Constant in my underestimation of the most simple things that for most of the people with whom I had the honour to share this dry and beautiful land are not just a luxury, but something to be offered to the gods.

This apple if I think about it, embodies the immense disparity between the rich and the poor of the world.

It costs 130 IRS per Kilo and arrives bright and tasty straight from Switzerland. The minimum wage following the Right to Information program has only recently been fixed in India to 125 rupies per day, not even enough for one these prohibited fruits. It is strange of the myth of Adam and Eve revolves around this fruit in particular, maybe their Eden was in India!

The echoes of women’s songs from a courtyard nearby, reminds me that we are in the marriage season. In most of the alternate months in India, even the poorest people find it in their heart to spend all their savings for a brand new finely decorated red sari to veil their bride adorned in all her family jewelry, her arms and feet covered in intricated mehndi designs. I think of the savvy philosophy of life here, of how it reconnected me to the roots of what really matters in life, life that means  nothing if is not shared and cherished, and saluted every now and then with a ritual, a celebration,

a reason to smile and be hopeful.

The Whole World in a Smile

In the City of Joy, the book that has filled my desert nights in those last days in Tilonia, Dominique Lapierre refers this way to the growing Indian proletariat,  that incredibly inventive variety of millions of manual workers, the victims of the spatial relocation of the industrial revolution set in motion by colonialism*

“with all the deference to Vishwakarma, the god adored by workers, these people were the real damned of the world, the slaves of hunger. And yet with what ardor and faith they fêted their god each year, and called down his blessing upon the machines and tools to which they were chained..” (Lapierre, The City of Joy)

Freedom is a Relation

* That re-location of industrial labour that Marx had already prophesized and partially observed, and that has been insightfully called the ‘Spatial Fix’ (David Harvey, 2001).