In one of my recent conversation with my friend this sentence came up. She is right now living in UK , as most other Indians working in an IT organizations, away from home . Well, today’s IT scenarios do demand a lot of energy and time. Add travel time of a big city to it, you won’t be left with anytime for yourself. I was planning to meet her during my London visit. That plan never materialized. Pertaining to my sickness, rainy weekend and her weakness too. She happened to be so busy to pick call even at 2100 in the evening. All I could hear was the mantra of “I am busy”.
I came back from London and had some post-visit email communication. In reply to one of my remark on “busy-ness” she said, “Paapi pet ka sawal hai, karna hi padta hai”. It is one of the very common sentences is India used by people, which literally means “have to do for the sake of hungry stomach”. She probably said it casually, but me being me, travelled through another track of thoughts. How casually we put blame on hunger for food. All that poor stomach need is some food. But the time that we spent being busy all day and night, weekdays or weekend, is generally not to fill up the tummy. It is most of the time related to earn more money to buy a house, its decoration, travel places, big car, throw parties, clothes or just sheer expenditure. Its all our ambition, greed, some time family concerns, peer pressure or simply rat race, but never poor stomach that needs that much hard work that we do not have time for ourselves.
Its strange, but we always feel it easy to find one or other excuse for our situation, decisions, consequences. It is too hard to simply accept.
After all, “paapi pet ka sawaal hai” đŸ˜‰
But for your soul keep laughing.
Arundeep Singh
