A leading opposition party observed a ‘day long’ fast for communal harmony; laudable indeed as communal harmony is often threatened. Fasting is also par to the course in a land where the father of the nation adopted this path to secure freedom. But there is a huge difference between version 1940 and 2018.
My maternal grandfather was a nationalist and freedom fighter and as a child I heard many stories at his knee, some about the indefinite fast he participated in when he was in prison and when the protestors had to battle force feeding with every ruse in their books, even that of eating chillies so that their throats would swell and the feeding tube not go through; fasts that laster weeks taking a toll on your health.
Version 2018 is quite different. You can observe a day long – read few hours – fast after making sure you have gorged yourself before. This is sufficient to get the needed headlines, the social media exposure and score some brownie points.
Today, I would like to speak about another kind of fast, longer than the token fast of today’s politicians: it is the one many of the ones we dismiss as ‘poor’ are forced to take everyday. I have seen many women waiting for their men to come back at the end of the day with the day’s wage that would allow them to buy what is needed for the evening meal. And if the man has stopped by the drinking hole, then in all likelihood everyone will sleep on an empty stomach. For many children this is far longer than the ‘token’ fast as their last meal would have been the midday meal given in government schools. These children often have a watery cup of tea and a ‘fen’ (small price of low quality puff pastry) for breakfast. The time between breakfast and the midday meal and the small midday lunch if longer than the one of the token fast.
Before we began the Yamuna Centre, the children would eat one meal in the morning and then toil on the fields with their parents, help sell the vegetables on the roadside and then eat their evening meal consisting of the unsold vegetables and some flat bread. You can work out the length of their ‘fast’!
It is sad that aven after seven decades of Independence 5000 children die everyday of malnutrition related disease. No one ‘fasts’ for them.
