Look at this picture, at first glance it may seem to be just two people and a child posing in front of the Birla temple in Delhi, India's capital city, nothing to write home about.
Look again and let me tell you the incredible bonds that underlie this picture. In normal circumstances these three should not be posing together. In our carefully crafted society replete with labels, and hermetic boxes the three belong to worlds that should never meet, let alone bond!
A on the right of your screen is an IIT engineer with a job in a multinational who should have been spending Sunday with his pals at some multiplex or mall. The man on the left is R, barely literate who drives a three wheeler and belongs to some backward and boorish village in the state of Bihar, and the kid, well is labels are confused, his mother a recovering drunk and his ancestry not quite defined. You may wonder what they are doing, and why they are looking happy and content. Some cynical mind may even venture to say that this is part of some marginal film script?
Well that is far from the truth. Amit , Radhey and popples spent their Sunday together, and had a ball. They took a metro ride, visited the temple had a great lunch, all part of Utpals monthly day out from his boarding school.
This is the India pwhy is trying to create, even if it goes down in recorded history as snapshots like this one. An India were bonds are made out of love and mutual respect. In this equation it is difficult to define who has given more, the child to the two adults of vice versa. Radhey and Amit who in today's India should have never talked to each other, or at best exchanged a few innuendoes had A's bike broken down and R given him a ride, have learnt to respect each other because of their bond to little utpal whose life has touched so many shattering boxes and discarding labels at the speed of light.
If i were to disappear today, this simple snapshot would have made my life worthwhileLabels: utpal