An Inspiring Hinterland Tale

This is from my diary of 2018. We have a bungalow in Manor about 100 km from our home 8n Mumbai. We did a quick mid-week trip to our bungalow there, an additional day coupled with the Gandhi Jayanti holiday. Decided to take a 30 km trip to Jawhar - the 'minor' hill station and tribal hinterland notorious for abject poverty & child malnutrition. Ironically, just about 125 km North of the commercial capital of the country and a blot on its uneasy conscience.

Saw a somewhat gratifying sight along the way in quite a few places, children - including girls in school uniforms, trudging school bags, strangely, some of them barefoot.

After lunch at a Dhaba, on reco of some locals went to 'Hanuman Point'. Turned out that the point overlooking a picturesque valley was so named because of an old Hanuman Temple there. Went to the clean and serene temple to pay obeisance to the deity. And what do we see right at the entrance, a most heartwarming sight - two tribal girls surrounded by books & writing furiously crouched over their notebooks. Aside from a glance, they almost ignored us. Shy as folding flowers, my attempt to strike a conversation and joke with them only elicited that they were studying in class 9. Sadhna asked them what were they studying and they whispered vidnyan (science). I asked if they would like to become Doctors or Engineers (the two professions imprinted on my subconscious mind as the stairway to success !) and said I would like to take their photograph with madam, but they refused in a fresh round of blushing and clinking laughter! In the scorching heat & hot winds of October, with nothing but the verandah of an old temple for shade, though dark-skinned, cheaply dressed and of ordinary features, at that moment they seemed to be the epitome of beauty - made even more beautiful by the glow of their single-minded application, their flustered, self-effacing shyness! It was something like what I had always felt about Lata Mangeshkar - though not good looking by any conventional standards, when you watch her sing, she transforms into the most beautiful woman in the world - her supreme craft inseparable from her physical person! So truly, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and the context.

And above all, the sight entranced me as it was a progenitor of change, of the hope that the girl child, after centuries of neglect, apathy, and sacrifice at the altar of history would finally have her place in the sun. That, if this happens in a back of beyond dustbowl like Jawhar, it could and may well be happening in other places. The thought was gratifying and suddenly the heat seemed to have lost its sting & the westward dipping sun held the promise of cooler, brighter dawn!