Tanked Nation

Absolutely UnWell! 

In our not so distant past, we had abundant water, everywhere around us. We never had any problems to access drinking water; it was waiting for us happily in our backyard wells.

Sometime later, it started going down all of a sudden (1970s - go figure!).

Instead of analyzing 'Why?', we simply installed electric pumps that lifted water at the push of a button. Needless to say, we turned them on too often, we stopped even bothering ourselves to turn them off.

This practice soon gave way to collective water points and distribution systems. When rivers ran dry, though we were too busy cutting trees all around, we made sure that we sunk lakhs of bore wells as we knew where the water was hiding.

More fallen trees and more bore wells later, we realized that the distribution systems stopped carrying water because we stopped feeding them with...water!

Too intelligent to give up, we pushed water tanks, millions of them, to transport water from the ever shrinking pools (though they were hiding, under ground).

The 'happily living ever after' us suitably modified our life styles to 'wait, fight and maybe collect those elusive two / three pots of water' to carry back home. You see, we got our fundamentals correct; we die if we don't drink water!

All along, we kept adding lot of water millionaires to push the stats of our country in the eyes of the world. Prestige, mate, prestige!

Whenever demand far exceeded supply, we brought water in trains.

What? You don't have a railway station in your place???! Bad luck mate!!

Wake up mate, and the nation, this is not just about water!  It is about everything we dearly need and everything we are short changed for!

Replace water with anything we die for, our approach has been the same.

Shame on us, I gotta go! Water tank arrives shortly!

What? Supply ran out already? Oh my, I need to rile against this in virtual world pronto! Bye!!

I narrate a near future scenario to close this post:

Your house is on fire! well past mid night...each of you inmates grab your phone, run out breathing fire, furiously photograph the flames, post it in Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Instagram so that the whole world knows what you are going through.

Within seconds, your neighbours...tweet back expressing their sympathy, emojis start raining in from your virtual world neighbours too. Your house is fully subsumed by fire. You start a discussion at once, what went wrong, what could have prevented this, why fire service came late with empty tankers, what must be the next steps, what must the govt do...all in your virtual world.

What happened to the proverbial bucket of water?

While Manjhis highlight the plight of our failed state and nation by taking up the tasks all by themselves, they also illuminate the strength of human spirit that 'moves' mountains in our real world.

A noble man said this some 150 years back: 'Give me 150 youth and I shall change the world'.

Everybody is still busy searching...