The Man Who Drives 15 Hours a Day
“India is my country and all Indians are my brothers and sisters. I love my country and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage….”
The national pledge of India rang in my ears, as I heard my uber driver conveying his time table to a friend on call. “You can’t survive in this job unless you put at least 15 hrs. on road”, he said. The seemingly innocuous statement banged in my mind a box of past memories, rendering it all open. India, a developing nation, is a story of hustlers, which make it a growing economy. A few minced chicken-like upper class, floating in the soup of the middle and the lower class. The latter being the hustlers.
Growing up in the house of a man who rose up from the ashes like a phoenix, from the clutches of abject poverty breathing down his neck, I too had the pressure to make a name for myself. In my case, though, it was far easier. Able to bounce on my privileges, I burnt the midnight oil and cracked the medical entrance — a distant dream of millions in India, still. Though I never got to hustle like my dad, who had done all the menial jobs to transition from the lower class to the middle class, I could relate with my driver nonetheless. In the overcrowded colonies of Delhi, living in a shamble of a room during my exam preparation days, eating food of a quality lower than some of my batchmates, I too had struggled, in a sense. From being nobody, to securing admission in the second best medical college of India, as rank 1.
Hence, when I heard the ordeal of my driver, I was kicked into a pit of nostalgia. The number of chapatis in my tiffin were unable to douse my hunger back then, but more than that, it was unable to snuff out the hunger that kindled deep within my heart. It was a hunger to rise up the social echelons and break through the shackles of mediocrity. A hunger to give meaning to the struggles of my Dad, and compound them with my own. A hunger to prove that the human brain had the power to transcend the social norms and prejudices, to flip the proverbial bird to the oppressions of the money-oriented world, to jump higher than the average humans weighed down by cash in their pockets, and to light up the torch on the younger cousins of my family, showing them what was possible.
Sure enough, after I cracked the medical entrance, followed my own sister. I became a doctor, and she too will be in the coming years. What makes me happy, is not solely our achievement in the face of odds, when everybody doubted our decision because, “This is not something that people of our status pursue”, as was told by one of my relatives. What makes me feel elated, is that those very relatives later pushed on their kids to become doctors just like me and my sister. We changed the wave of thought. We turned the wind. We carved rivers of success through the mountains of orthodoxy. All because, we dared to dream, and hustle. Hustle like my father did. Like my late grandmother did.
Hustle India! Hustle. For the lost glory will be won.
The Unknown Doctor
