What price paradise?

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

So wrote Seamus Heaney.

This sweltering heat is making me go nuts. I have just come back home today after yet another two days of continuous travelling to a city I love with all my heart except the heat makes me want to slither into a cool cave and wait there until summer ends. I have also been strongly fighting against the urge of not being able to churn out words lately. Seems like my brain has melted all the thinking nerves. Right now, the news on TV is running a reel on water shortage and drought in villages not far from Mumbai's peripheral areas. Water from rivers and dams located in these villages was supplied via pipelines to the Greater Mumbai and Thane suburbs. Now, the residents there travel for miles and often into other villages in search of a pot of water. Borewells and groundwater reserves have long depleted and the only visible proof of an existence of a river are the remnants of the stones and dry trails on land. This makes me think of the next five years. If the current hot weather is an indication of anything we must brace ourselves for the drastic changes in future, then it's a worrisome issue indeed. One that we are still not working upon. It is so easy for me to write about water scarcity and yet so difficult to work on solutions to curb it. During my travels last week, I found out urbanised areas have it so easy as regards to water supply and consumption. Citizens scarcely give second thought about wasting a glass of water when all of us could be really saving it especially seeing how hot this season has turned out this year. 

One of the hardest things of travelling is enduring the constant climate changes and adjusting according to these changes. I am a very non fussy traveller when it comes to food or accomodations or transport facilities but I sure do cringe when I see how difficult it is getting day by day to live in a city. The constant wheez of vehicles, smoke, substandard transport and public hygiene amenities has turned urban areas into ghastly disatrous living zones. Somehow our entire gamut upon creating safe, livable cities is not meeting its envisioned goals. Today as I was travelling back home, a mother and her son sat across me in the taxi we shared together. Her son was in his mid-twenties, tall, healthy, bright and such a good looking guy only except he was Autistic. I was tuned in to the mother-son conversation because he was loud enough to talk without any inhibitions and his mother was patient all the while. But it just broke my heart to see such a good young life limited to only a few things in this world. I felt sad that we haven't had opportunities to rehabilitate or find a good social structure for individuals who suffer from health disorders. Our very large nation, has been trifle unssuccessful in creating a balanced environment for all its citizens. That includes the Differently-abled, Dalits, Tribals, the economically backward communities, women too. 

Will there ever be a future that envelops every individual into a safe and prosperous zone? It's like imagining a very fictional state of being because it seems impossible to just have a few prosper and let the others rotting in a hell hole. Our view on human rights and delivering equal opportunities finds no common ground. The rich wish to keep getting richer and hoard their riches and the poor are delving down rapidly into a graveyard of poverty. There is no middle ground elsewhere. Either we fight against corporations or we fight for the rights of the disadvantaged. I wonder how long until we exhaust our energies fighting the bad and letting it carry over our human world? Today in one corner of our planet we are fighting against obesity in economically prosperous nations and elsewhere are starved, drought laden, malnourished communities. We can't seem to provide for all and the efforts being done to curb these inequalities have resulted in a naught so far, often triggering other forms of violent acts for survival. I can't get my head around the fact that I am able to ponder over all of this and somewhere else children are robbed of their future, of living their lives in constant fear and oblivion, in hunger, in a darkness that does not promise new sunrises of hope filled eternity. It breaks my spirits when I come across these consistent inequalities fully aware of my helplessness. I wish I did more than just writing about it here and expressing my glum. For now, that's all I deem to be happening and this just makes my resolve to be a change in this system more and more, vigorously. Unless we lift ourselves out of this drudgery and pity, we won't be able to work at wiping these human miseries at all.