She just wants her kid to be happy

Today I am going to write about the maid we have had in our house since as far as I can remember. She has worked for the family for more years than I have been alive.

10 years ago, I overheard her having a conversation with another maid in which she questioned how all her life she basically worked for this one family. That how she couldn’t believe that that was all there was to life. That ALL her life she will work for the same family earning a meager amount and that’s it, then her life is over. There was disappointment in her tone, disbelief in her words and utter resignation in her air.

Quite recently, a relative of mine suggested that she should send her son (who has come of age I think he is 17 now) to some vocational training center where he can learn to be a mechanic, an electrician or a plumber.  She didn’t out rightly deny the idea, in fact pursued it to some end as well, but some days later, she came up to me and told me very directly. She said if she wanted to make him a plumber, she wouldn’t have sent him to school in the first place. She would directly send him to work at a plumber and by now at 17 he would have learnt quite a bit of work. She didn’t want him to do anything that required no formal education.

She doesn’t want to continue being part of the class that she is part of. She doesn’t want that her kid would work at other people’s houses (which she herself did all her life). She wants him to move up a step in the social ladder but the people around him wouldn’t let her.
Another aspect of this situation is that all her life she believed education will help her change things for the kid and now her faith is education is waning. She thought in order to be rich, you need to be educated. I don’t want to be the one who tells us that the number 1 criteria to be rich is try to be born at the right place. 

Death

If you study astronomy, then you are so amazed and appalled by the complexity of the universe that nothing else excites you like that anymore. Well nothing but life. With all its colours, shades, varieties, types and forms contained on earth alone, life remains one of the two most fascinating things ever.

The only thing that does justice to the beauty of life is quite paradoxically, death. I couldn’t have imagined a better end to life than the fact that one day, all of it must end. There is so much poetic beauty in it but only if you care enough to look. What a great end death is. Poems should be written about it and songs should be sung. Songs that highlight all human endeavors and struggles coupled with all the different sorts of feelings humans come factory assembled with. Top amongst them would be ambition, the will to achieve something or the oft heard of and never really scientifically ascertained feeling of love that allegedly fills the cosmos with its beauty. How about jealousy? The “I wish I had more of this thing I see my friend has”. Then there should tales of great kings that thought they were gods or of mighty empires that dreamed of ruling the world. Then there should be music. After all we connect so deeply with it. All the best melodies should be compiled all great records re-mastered and remade. All these things fade into oblivion when compared with the ultimate champion of all cool things, death. For only death and decay is real, everything else is a facade.