ragging to bragging

the chairs, they are few.

the music, that’s a plenty, playing sometimes, stopping sometimes and playing again

This was 90s. Around summer time, something would catch my attention. I would be caught between the proverbial “gully and galla” … gully if you recall from the famous movie “gully boy” means street and here i am referring to gully cricket i would love to play, and “galla” is the cash counter in marwari language.

Dad would insist (if insist is polite for force; but i must admit he did the absolute right thing if i now look back and how much i learnt and experienced being at the small grocery shop) me to be at the shop. I now know how much of sincere and hard work he did his entire life. I can’t even imagine doing 10% of the hard work he is done for us. He got married early, didn’t complete any education, came to Mumbai, and after a couple of years of working as a helping-boy at a grocery store, he started as a door-to-door hawker. He knew the value of sincere hard work done over a period of time.

Come summers and a bunch of usual customers would come and make purchases much higher than their usual months. One day i thought i would ask.

Dad wasn’t around and I was mannning the shop (yeah! from a child the shop i instantly would man the shop when Dad would leave … i would call the shots..).

Golden Uncle came to the shop. I am still wondering all this life as to why did someone name this person “Golden”. And was it his real name or people would call him so. Golden Uncle was short but wide. He had peculiar haircut, like the Doraemon style for an adult. And he would carry a red-and-white-fine-checked gamcha (indian rural bandana). There are very few people who laugh heartily when they are made fun of (making fun in a nice, not nasty, way). Golden was one of them. Maybe, he had some golden rule cracked for life. Smiling and gentle and unarmed and unarming.

He began, “its going to take time. i have a long list”. And we both began. He would volley the order from the other side and i would fetch the stuff and return the volley. After a few minutes in the game, I asked him if i could ask him something. He looked at me. And that look was enough of an approval.

I asked, “why do you and some other folk buy so much of stuff around summer time"?”.

He hand-combed his doraemon-styled-uncombable hair and pitched, “have you been ragged ever? (hindi: tumhari kabhi khichaai hui hai???!!!). I had tons of inventory for this and the answer also came in tone of high-pitch reply, “yessssss”.

He sighed over the following, “Look! We are all immigrants here. We have come from small villages. The village folks would make fun anyways. And when we left the village for better prospect, they make even more fun.

Saying stuff like “you couldn’t do anything here, what monument are you going to build somewhere else?”. So, we buy a lot of these stuff and send them to village to impress upon them that we are doing well.”

We also chatted about how some migrants would keep taking more and more unserviceable debt to send stuff home.

Sometimes for home consumption. Sometimes for bragging. Sometimes for both. Sometimes aping someone else sending stuff. Sometimes not knowing.

Meanwhile. we continued mutual-fulfilling.

He, my curiosity! I, his order list!

I didn’t understand it much then. But later i realized that a lot of people rag each other over life. And these ragging stays with us. And then we look for bragging rights…through possessions, designations, displaying what we are doing and where we have been. Imagine if just today, 7bn+ of us end up ragging someone intentionally or unintentionally. And if 7bn+ of us brag about something. What are these ragging and bragging ratcheting up (creating inter-ratcheting loops, meaning outsmarting, outdoing, etc)? And in what ways are we harming our future generation and civilization as a whole? Maybe there is some golden insight hidden if we ponder these?

Ending with this famous line: We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.

And in this sense, we are never home. We are migrants too. We are wanting to be “happy” with something else, some place else. And we deprive ourselves of asking the eternal “who am i” and “why i am doing what i am doing”. Thats the great and more deeper “migrant crisis” in my humble submission.