Think about it

The rain pours from heaven the way water is wrung from a washcloth. There is a careless abandon as the water is first squeezed out, a birthing separation of matter and matter, and then released.

I think of the indians. I think of the indians in india who face suicide- I say face suicide as if suicide were the plague, not the choice. But let me lay out the situation for you and see what else you would call it.

They are poor. They are heavily indebted. They are the losers at the bottom of the ladder who get not crumbs from under the table, but spit. Farmers in india face poverty as their livelihood is leached from them. Manipulation is cleverly disguised as an option- at the end of the day, the signature signed by one's own hand turns out to be the cause of one's inherent destruction. The people behind the paperwork, alas, have somehow absolved themselves of all responsibility for your welfare in some sub-clause under some sub-heading of some submerged agenda.

Farmers are made to buy machinery they cannot afford, chemicals that in the end they swallow to end their lives, and seeds that yield no crop. They are made to declare their loyalty, to conform to a system of MNCs and 'green revolutions' and then left to die after pledging their allegiance.

I choose to impose their situation into our reality. Why is it that there are grown men struggling to feed their family to the point that desperation clues to death, when children, mere children who know not how to earn a cent, spend money as we please? Why are there so many restaurants and clubs and cinemas and hotels and services in our lives that are so pallid in comparison with the blunt needs of these people? I choose to ask why is it that I can buy a coffee for $4.50 and think nothing of it, when $4.50 could feed a family for a week?

But what is the solution? To give the money to them? The idea is absurd. Why absurd? Because its not sustainable- as is what has always been told to us. So what- we build foundations for them to have life changing encounters, to start anew? What do we do as students- raise the funds of them? Yet when I come across fund-raisers in school, the persons collecting funds tend to have a mildly vegetative attitude towards the project that makes me really wonder what their reason really is for participating in the fund-raiser. Project aim: Raise funds for suicide farmers in India/Gain extra points for myself so that I can stay continue to stay in the hostel. This, I have been guilty of! True, the funds do, hopefully, get to them but the spirit of the cause has failed to mark our society.

The poignancy of the situation I suppose, is the too-obvious contrast between the secure and the needy, between the sheltered and the beggar. There is a trend in the world that the people who do not need more tend to receive in abundance, like for example hollywood stars and football players, whereas those who do need continue to loose, like the farmers whose crops are destroyed as they struggle against the weather. There is a market for artificially made scenes of tragedy, whereas true affliction remains undocumented, or if documented, shunned. There is a market for fun, attractions, entertainment; there is no market for your depressive life story, oh jilted farmer. There seems to be this innate unfairness to the spin of the world, the axis that tilts towards injustice as those who suffer suffer more.

The ultimate loss of life that comes with suicide I suppose is something I hope you take to heart. It is like the final fullstop at the end of the last sentence of the last paragraph in a book. What follows is empty space, a blank page, then a hardcover that envelops the book which sits on a shelf to be covered in dust. Actually no, I take that back. A suicide is like the ellipsis after a climax, only the falling action is a fall into the life after.

Rain pours from heaven as tears pour from the eyes of the poor.