Prologue:

The chugging train seemed to carry much more than the load of the attached bogeys, the deep moaning memories of the on-board passengers continued to fill the vacuum of the night – settled into my berth and tucked into covers for a healthy siesta, the muted discussions seldom laced with swears and calls to the Almighty dragged well into the late night.

Alighting the next morning at Kolkata with the relatively light hand-bag, I could only fathom and to some extent empathize with the heavy load of a life-time of valuables randomly punched into bags & containers of arbitrary size and shape carried on shoulders already pressed down by the weight of the heavy heads they supported. The ‘Capital Express’ had as though bridged the dusk of their past lives in erstwhile home ‘Saharsa’, kissing the dawn of the about-to-start new life elsewhere.

A few months lapsed and the newspaper headlines of one of the worst floods in a decade to have hit the country gave way to the Thackeray’s lashing out at the ‘others’ whilst stamping their unilateral authority on ‘Mumbai’. Incoming trains were torched and being a Bihari in Mumbai was nightmarish going by live testimonials.

Meanwhile, being a Mumbaite in ‘Bihar’ hardly seemed to matter to people – the opportunity and manpower demand/supply market forces that justify the position of a city/state as a congregation point of people leading to a melting pot of cultures may have a certain element of justification in the situation, but beyond a certain point, it is acceptance of the other whilst empathizing with his situation and going beyond narrow prejudices to accept another as a justified piece in the larger national, global & human jigsaw that makes us truly stand out; especially so, when you see the same standing ground in an otherwise notorious state like ‘Bihar’ and loosing stead in an otherwise cultured cosmopolitan like ‘Mumbai’.

Hope ‘The Full Circle’ leaves you with a perspective - the next time you came across that rag-picker or the cobbler boy, there’s probably a story of steely conviction in the face of unending agony that’s there to be explored in those muted eyes.

As the year draws to a close and we party into it, let’s not forget that tonight’s cover charge could actually set someone up for life – as we step into the new year, time you wrote that cheque you’d been planning to send to that NGO working in the slums or better still, made a trip to that old-age home you’d been looking forward to else started that first job training & nurturing the under-privileged who’d make much more of your education than the privileged lot possibly could.

Wishing you a ten on ten 2010…
Gautam