By Utsav Chaudhary:
An obese man in his late 30s, riding his scooter with his wife on the pillion & children adjusted somewhere on the undefined parts of the seat is an image of what we portray of a stereotypical middle class family. The head of the family might be wearing a smile on his face but what lies beneath is what we are unaware of. The rent of the house is due, the EMI for the education loan of his children is to be paid and so many little things that are to be cleared out but the spending for the month has already crossed the set budget. This might be the breaking limit of his concern as loans and rents are all he can think of. A stress free life is all he coveted but fortune of a luxurious life is denied to him. Are the middle class people in India restricted to these things and have no other option to bring about a change in their lifestyle?vote bank, small Probably not because fighting to fulfill the daily needs tires him out.
In India, the common middle class or say the cattle class man is just another vote for the leaders. His life is addendum to the vote bank and his death is just a deduction to it, other than that no one is concerned about him. Just to get his one file cleared he has to loosen up his pocket. At hospitals, where the cost of treatments are reaching sky high now, there is no source for the middle class man to get his treatment done and has to be settled with a low quality treatment instead depending upon his little budget. In order to ensure a prosperous future for his children he even saves a large part of his dwarf sized income.The always rising rate of inflation and fuel hikes aren’t helping his cause dragging him into a spot of bother. Majority of population in India falls in the cattle class which should have been a boon for them but this class is the most vulnerable of all making it a boon of being cursed for them.
The problems faced by the middle class is not new to our society. Even many writers have mentioned the cattle class in their prestigious works. Hindi Contemporary writer Rajesh Joshi in his poem “ITYA-AADI” which means etcetera has written the bitter truth about this class. He said in his poem that the etceteras are the people who are found to be most in number but are also ignored the most in this world. Only the rich people are noticed in this world. All others live and die as “ITYA-AADIs”. This modern day work portrays the truth that we see around us and pretend to be unaware of.
The struggling class as we can also call them forms a faction of people that have to endeavor themselves to do something which they might hate. The Government has plans for the people falling below the poverty line or farmers while the rich pay taxes that help government execute these schemes. The cattle class neither becomes a part of the schemes nor they get other advantages but have to pay taxes instead. Thus this cream of the population falls somewhere in between the rich and the poor. This corroborates the point that the only respite left for them is hard work. The Government should also come up with plans for people like this who have dreams in their eyes but have to let those fall out with the tears. Now can the Government solve the conundrum of this section of the society to secure their future and pull their forgotten dreams out of the abyss and change the flow of tears forcing them backwards?