Helplessness....

I have slowly become used to the longevity of my two hour trek to Parivartan from home. Whenever I find myself having to repeatedly ask for a ticket on the bus or being forcefully pushed onto an overflowing 2nd class train compartment, I console myself with the notion that I am traveling with the people of this city. The rich and the poor, the dark and the light-skinned, the Hindus and the Muslims - they surround me wherever I go. I like to believe that I am one of them. I also like to believe that if you look from far enough away, we will all just be people and you won't be able to tell the difference between us. But no one is far enough to do that and when one is far enough, he would rather look at what is close. I cannot complain, I would do the same. Wouldn't we all?

The buses are crowded - sometimes there is no room to sit. And the trains...well those are even more crowded - there is almost never room to sit. But I've trained myself to ignore the chatter and the pushing and shoving and the somewhat-subdued fight for limited seating. In fact, it is traveling on Mumbai's infamous transportation system where I have trained myself to think - about life, about what I see as I zoom past a vegetable market, about the little girl who sells hair-clips for 10 rupees on the train and mostly about Parivartan.

Today, as I was thinking, I felt a drop of water on my hand. I turned my head towards the sky to see where it had come from, when I realized it had come from my eyes. Sometimes there are so many thoughts racing through your mind that you are unable to consciously assign emotions to them. You never realize when your eyes had begin to cry, or when your heart began to hurt. And even when you catch yourself midway, you forget that your mind has already come up with a thousand reasons for the next several precious drops of liquid emotion to fall to the floor. As I frantically brought up my arm to cover my face, I understood why I had expelled those salty teardrops. I understood why my heart hurt. I understood why it would always be hard for me to work with those children at the slums. I had discovered helplessness in its crudest and most unforgiving form.

Helplessness. It's difficult to observe, it's difficult to feel, and it's difficult to solve. It's one of the reasons why no one goes back to the slums after rising from poverty in this city. It's the reason that everybody locks away their emotions when they see the little girl begging for money on Wadala station. Helplessness is the reason why Vijay, the chai-wallah, can't go to school as other boys his age do.

There is not enough room in government schools for all the children in the slum to go to school. And although the Indian government has promised to provide free education to every child in India, the slum dwellers are helpless. Their voices are not enough to send all their children to school. Today for the first time, I've realized how important an education is. It gives us the key to set our helplessness free. It allows us to discover our own voices. And mostly, it teaches us to use those voices on the unfriendly platform that is this world. It is education that makes us recognize how strong our need to be heard is.

Today I have caught my first true glimpse of a tangled web of problems with no beginning and no end. It is a web I don't have the resources, the time, nor the knowledge to unravel. It is a web so vulnerable to breakage, yet so resistant to change. It is a web that will take me a lifetime to understand. Today I have finally come across the cruel truth that I won't be able to save the world. Today, I too have begun to feel helpless.