musings at traffic lights

At New Delhi’s traffic signals, you can buy anything: pirated books, discounted magazines, clumsy Chinese toys, blessings of various gods and goddesses, sunshades for your car, an acrobatic performance by young children, copies of the Bhagavad Gita, boxes of tissue, bright yellow dusters, flowers picked up from graveyards, slices of coconut, booklights—you name it. Someone I hear about is even planning to teach street children enough poetry so that they can sell poems at traffic lights! I’m always amazed at the variety of things, and at the way any new hot sale item finds its way to almost all South Delhi traffic lights simultaneously. I marvel at the ingenuity and the excellent business sense behind the steering wheel covers in the hot summer months and behind the little children who try to shove The Cosmopolitan down my throat because, apparently, I look like a woman who reads and, apparently, women who read must read that magazine. Who thinks of these things, I sometimes wonder; how do they pick these things up? I hardly ever buy anything at traffic lights, but I do sometimes enjoy the sheer variety of this “street market” in the most literal sense possible.

Today, though, I saw a new one that made me very sad.

An old, hunched over gentleman was selling little Indian flags. Independence Day is around the corner, and my first thought when I saw those was of our Independence Day celebrations in school, for which we were all expected to paint little flags to bring to the auditorium and wave on command. Some of us painted them, others made life simpler by using colored paper strips, and still others bought ready-made flags very like the ones the old man was selling at the traffic light today.

After that initial moment of nostalgia, though, I was struck by the profound irony of the situation. This old gentleman, too old even to walk comfortably, was dodging traffic and jumping onto the road every time the light turned red in an effort to sell a few flags… to this man, what do 61 years of independence mean? To him, and millions of others like him, whom India had failed in so many ways, what does holding that flag mean? I don’t understand flags in general, but if it’s true that waving your flag high is an expression of pride in your country, what reason does this old man have to be proud of India?

Maybe I am being patronizing; maybe he has a lot of reasons to be proud of this country, maybe I should stop wondering about the thoughts of someone whose life I do not understand. But then again, if I stopped wondering about other people’s thoughts, I would no longer have a reason to write!