This blog post was written 14 years ago when I was 20 years old. It never left my hard drive until this point. Please forgive me if you come out of this thinking that having this realization at 20 years old was already too late.
Two weeks ago, the ceiling fan in my room started making a lot of noise. It would run for hours with a terrible squeaking sound that made it difficult for me to sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night, frustrated by the sound, leading to insomnia.
I complained about it to my parents for days before they decided that something needed to be done about it. So, they called up a technician for a home visit.
This was over a week ago.
Then, for a couple of days, we got no response from the technician. My sleepless nights continued and, as a result, I had been short-tempered and irritable for the past week. I was angry and waiting for a chance to let the company have a piece of my mind.
Finally, today I got the call. A voice asked whether we were the ones who complained about the noisy fan. I said yes and sent him the directions to our apartment from his location. Now, Dombivli, my hometown, like most Tier 2 Indian cities, is like a spider web of roads and gullies and dead ends. I helped him the best I could and hung up.
Ten minutes later, a frustrated voice asked me on the phone “Why are you sending me around in circles? I have other orders too, you know.”
Hearing the rude response, and I can’t believe how quickly, I lost my cool too and replied sharply, “You are standing in the middle of God knows where and asking me for directions? How am I supposed to help you?”
We argued for a few seconds, and I agreed to pick him up. From the way things had begun, I had the feeling it was going to be a bad evening.
When I got to his supposed location, I was surprised to see no one who looked like a technician. Instead, I saw a scrawny teenager in a dusty, greased shirt, old-school bell-bottom pants, and frayed shoes. He stood with drooping shoulders and a large tool bag in his hand.
He couldn’t have been a day older than me.
He asked me whether I had come looking for him. I said “Yes,” and we started walking together quietly, with no pleasantries given the tense exchange a few minutes ago.
To be honest, the very sight of him had sublimated all my anger. Instead, I felt a wave of sympathy.
He pointed to the road I lived on and asked, “Where do you live? Down that road?”.
I said, “Yes”.
He frowned and said, “I have been down there twice, but I still couldn’t find your house. I asked a lot of people. This is my 12th house for the day. I’ve been walking in circles for about 40 minutes trying to find your house. I should have been done by 6:00 clock. It’s 7:00 now and I don’t get paid for overtime.”
The tone of his voice would have usually set me off. But that anger had now subsided. Hearing him talk now made me regret my outburst on the phone. All I wanted now was for him to calm down.
We reached home. Like every time, I was cautious while letting anyone into the house. Being robbed by repairmen in the past, I was not going to take any chances.
I looked for the warranty card for the fan while he patiently sat on the sofa. As soon as I found it, he went straight for his tool bag and asked for a stool. I got him one and sat back watching him work.
Sitting there, watching this stranger who was the same age as me and working a job that I couldn’t imagine myself doing in a million years, brought strange thoughts into my head. He worked with a machine-like efficiency that reminded me of my own attempts with electronic instruments in my college lab.
It made me realize just how careless I was in my attitude. A carelessness that I think can be attributed to most of the people I knew.
I studied in one of the best colleges in Mumbai. I, like most of my peers, come from well-off families, have had a proper education, and have parents who can afford to send us to college.
In a sense, I’m very lucky.
Digest this — two-thirds of Mumbai’s population live in slums. That means more than 60% of the people living in the economic capital of the country live in an area of less than 100 sq ft. The living conditions are deplorable. Open gutters; communal toilets; exposed overhead electrical wiring; narrow, perpetually dark passageways; lack of privacy; constant noise and chatter. My one-bedroom apartment is a far cry from how most of the people I share the daily commute with start and end their day.
The families living in such areas have a very bleak view of their economic future. They send their children to a municipal school and don’t have any plans after education except for maybe hoping that the children join them in their profession which can be anything from selling vegetables to working odd manual labor daily wage jobs around the city.
Talking to the technician, I found out more.
He lived in Kurla, an hour away from where I live, and had been working for the company for two years. He had worked in a workshop all his life and did not have a proper education. All he knew was fixing fans. It was the only thing he could do and, maybe, the only thing that he was expected to do.
I have this corporate media-curated version of an unsatisfied life in my head — that a 9-to-5 job in an air-conditioned office may stifle my creativity; that my whole life would get trapped in a 6 by 6 feet cubicle; that I would wish I was just a little luckier or smarter to be in a more exciting and rewarding career.
Here, in front of my eyes, was a person who had lived his entire life in a 6 feet by 6 feet room, had had his freedom taken away from him at several points in his life, and now, for reasons that only he knows, or better yet, reasons whose seriousness only he can understand, had to work a job going door to door to random people’s houses, fixing their dirty fans, and at the same time quietly fielding complaints about how bad the service is.
I realized that until now I had never really given thought to how life could have been worse if I had been born in a different place or time. I was resentful of my parents for making certain choices for me but I failed to see that being born to people who care for me and who can afford to give me the chance at a better life is one of the luckiest things in the world. The choices they made for me were only made to protect me.
I also realize now that all my advantages only offer me a chance at a better life. Nothing is guaranteed. When I graduate and enter the workforce, the real impact of my upbringing and education is going to be plain to see.
I, like a lot of my friends, wrongfully believe that nothing in our life has been handed to us on a silver platter. We all have our stories of personal struggle — hitting practice daily for that spot on the sports team, studying hard to score a good rank in class, and going to the gym regularly to achieve that ideal physique. If I didn’t know sacrifice, I wouldn’t have scored well enough on the state entrance test to get admitted to college.
Hard work pays off. But the rewards of hard work are temporary. After you have achieved something, the journey to getting it almost seems trivial compared to the hard work of keeping the momentum going.
I see many people around me wanting to blow all this good luck away. I feel it when I look at myself in the mirror now. The guy fixing my fan never got a chance. I wonder how he feels when he looks at his own reflection.
In Slumdog Millionaire, the award-winning Danny Boyle movie that thrust India’s social and economic challenges into the spotlight in 2008, there is a scene where a beggar mafia boss is seen blinding a young boy using hot oil just because a blind, pitiful beggar earns more money than an able-bodied one. Like everyone else, it disturbed me too. It forces you to confront the injustice in the world.
Other’s misfortune when laid bare in all its horror can make us appreciate everything that we have to be grateful for. Now, I feel that wasting my time in front of a TV is a crime because there is something better I could have been doing. Wasting my time on frivolous pursuits and my money on fleeting purchases now seems like an injustice to the person in front of me who would kill for a chance to live the life I live.
Later, I found out that he was just a year older than me.
A few years from now, I expect to be in a nice comfortable career with a house in a decent respectable neighborhood with a life of my own, even if it means I’ve to live weekend to weekend. The person in front of me really doesn’t want any more from his life than me. But the difference is that, for him, it’s like a distant dream.
Who do I blame for this? In India, particularly, religion shares some of the blame. It gives us a reason to, in the best case, ignore this imbalance and, in the worst case, blame the sufferer for their misfortune. The Hindu concept of karma has its benefits, yes, such as granting believers an almost stoic indifference to the small inconveniences in life, but it has also been heavily weaponized throughout history to justify and perpetuate the caste system.
Things are not as bad for me as my teenage turmoil once made me believe. I have been given a chance at a better life. And the choice of what to do with that remains with me.
So, I could choose to complain about a noisy fan or be a little patient and spend my time on other better things. I have to solve my own problems and try to do it conscientiously so that the lessons remain with me. I must learn to stop living in my self-inflicted hell and learn to deal with these small irritations in a better way.
Because what other choice do I have?
The boy finished working. I signed a receipt and saw him wearing his shoes. As he was tying his laces, he paused for a second, as if completely lost, eyes fixated on something outside the door.
What must he be thinking about? His long journey home in the crowded train or the next set of dirty fans requiring repair tomorrow? But the moment passed, he finished wearing his shoes, and silently walked out, inadvertently teaching me the lesson of a lifetime.