working over!

Has any one of you got a royal working over by Pune’s rikshawalls? I have, very recently. Having gotten off at Shivajinagar on my way back from Mumbai, I hailed a rikshaw and asked him if he would take me to Kothrud. The response I got was, ‘I’ll talk you anywhere in Pune as long as it is between 9am and 9pm and you are willing to pay’. Considering that a mere ‘yes’ would have sufficed, I figured that I’d come across that pestilential breed, Pune’s notoriously verbose rikshawalla. I sat with a foreboding of more verbal volleys and ere long, he fired the first salvo. ‘Do you know who really need reservations’? I could only shrug and ask sheepishly, ‘who’? ‘It’s the Brahmins. Your people (considering that I am fair and spoke chaste Marathi, it wasn’t too much of a stretch for him to guess that I was of Brahmin stock) will at least use reservations properly for development. Today all Brahmins are moving abroad and using their skills to develop other countries. And let me tell you, as a proud Maratha, I am 100% against reservations for Marathas. We don’t need them and even if we are to get reservations, we won’t use these properly’. ‘Hmmm’, I replied, non-committally. The next question wasn’t too far away, ‘Do you know the one factor that results in the development of any state’? I was increasingly beginning to feel ill at ease. He was asking me questions that had no easy answers. I tried my non-committal shrug once again but this time he was not so easy to placate. ‘Tell-tell’, he prompted. I said, ‘there can be so many reasons, what do you have in mind’. His answer, ‘WATER. Every state fights for it and the state that has ample of it will do well. That is the only way to prosperity’. His next question was more personal – ‘why do you think you are sitting back there and I am plying this rikshaw? What is the big difference between you and me?’ This question was uncomfortable because it offered no diplomatic escape. Thankfully, he was keen to bite into the answer. ‘ENGLISH! He exclaimed. You know it well and I don’t. And that is why I have put my son in an English school and will ensure that he gets all the advantages of a modern education’.
Thankfully, we were nearing our destination and conversation tends to flag towards the fag end of a journey. Within a couple of minutes, I was out and sitting home, savouring the quietude that only 6/2, Shree Ganesh Park, can provide.