Don't be mistaken ... I am not into social work, as you would expect. It is just a course requirement, which opened a small window for me into the lives of the socially trampled and marginalised. Please be assured, again, that the biased tone of the above statement hardly signals the arrival of a new crusader-against-poverty on the block, but its just that it is the truth.
Our society has, over a period of time, defined and redefined the 'poor'. Poor sounded hackneyed ... so we decided to call them 'needy'. But needy had a self-defeating connotation to it. How can anybody with an iota of self-respect be called needy? So, he became 'deprived'. And then 'underpriviledged'. When underpriviledged was overused, he became 'disadvantaged'.
He may not have a single dime even today... but he has a great vocabulary.
I have no take-aways from this course. The window that I had talked about had a collapsible hinge. It is shut now. The salt pans are a fading memory.
But the assortment of emotions ... pride ... self-belief ... gratefulness ... the feeling of being recognised ... and a ray of hope that the video writ large on the face of a salt pan worker ... I would like to carry that along with me.
[Influenced by and drawn from Feiffer, Jules' quote]
