Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The plight of the 8216;Okies8217; has been all too graphically portrayed by John Steinbeck in his classic,The Grapes of Wrath. Consecutive years of drought had turned Oklahoma into a dust bowl. With the crops withered, the farmers had no option but to desert their fields and head west to California. Their bitter struggle, as also sublime acts of decency,leave behind enduring images.
Unlike Steinbeck, I avoid long travels. Nor am I a gifted man of letters. Nonetheless, reading newspapers has been a habit with me. My day starts with scanning the headlines, and I gathered that migrant workers seemed to be in the limelight, even if for all the wrong reasons. One is aghast to learn that during certain seasons, a whopping 15 per cent of rural India could be on the move. Since they lack even the most basic documents of identification, they make do with with rudimentary or no amenities.
One late night, I was driving back from town. All of a sudden it started to drizzle, the street lights had broken down, and I almost collided into a band of people ambling along the road casually. I screamed at them and hurled a few expletives too. After a silence, they informed me that they were manual labourers from a province very far away and were going down the road so as to start repairing it very early the next day. They had trekked all the way to do a hard and humble task for people like me. My head dipped in remorse.
