Life and Sustenance: A tryst with Privilege in the Pandemic.

 What was the pandemic like for you? How would our answer to this question look like, when asked several years from now? Do we speak of how we remained safe at home? How we spent it binge-watching or trying out new recipes in our kitchen, or about how we finally got round to finish reading the long line of books that were part of our booklist? Or do we narrate the story of how you simply enjoyed peaceful moments in the cradles at home?

Did you start out enjoying the lockdown days, then gradually getting bored and finally end up hating every bit of it? Did you have the privilege of staying at home? Did you have someone to speak to and get pacified whenever loneliness or anxiety beckoned? And finally, when the virus seemed to settle down, did you fight against inertia to break away from your rusty rest and finally start moving again? Well, I certainly went through all of these. To sum up my experience, I would say that I was endowed with “the privilege to stay safe in a global pandemic.”

As things settled down a bit, I went round to visiting the students whom I was “teaching” for the past few months. I met their parents, whom I used to call and pester every now and then for not sending their children to the classes on time, or for not submitting the asynchronous assignments. The visit was truly a lesson on life; it was life teaching me the micro-levels of how privilege works.

Majority of the kids whom I visited were living in a single room house, which functioned as the bedroom, living room, guest room and kitchen. Here, the average living space required for a family of four to live comfortably is around 2400 square feet. The general concept that each person requires approximately 200-400 square feet of living space, is thrown out of the wind here. Here, these houses have just 200-400 square feet of area in total to be shared by all the members of the household. Here, they need to climb down every day to fetch the yellowish water from the hand pumps for completing their daily chores. Sometimes on a very busy morning, these pumps simply ditch them and they are left with no water for the day.

The streets are so congested, chaotic; the children roam around, playing with their friends all day long, without wearing sandals, let alone a mask. The children don’t even care, and the game just goes on. The parents, most of them daily wage workers, need to go out every day to find a living. They work as delivery boys, housemaids, electricians, car drivers or as contract workers building the mighty heights of the city. For them, life is all about earning the means of livelihood for the day. Most of them are confused about what to do and how to help their child in getting a “better” education and life.

Pandemic? Pandemic is for the privileged. For these human beings, it is just ‘the normal’ with little more struggles added to it. They ‘need’ to go out. They ‘need’ to find a living. Sometimes they take their children along with them to the workplace. Sometimes, children attend classes sitting in a corner of a boys hostel where their mother works as a cleaner. Child safety? It is for the privileged. Social capital? It is for the elite. For the poor, there are greater unending perils in the vicious cycle of daily life.

For them, schools are places where their children are safe, where they get food while they are away for their daily work. Now with the pandemic shutting down schools, they are out of that option too and are eagerly waiting for the schools to reopen.

The welcoming scene that I got to see while visiting Kannagi Nagar, almost the Dharavi of the south, was a mass procession of people mourning and celebrating a death, the beats of “parai”, the agile dance of masculinity, along with the loud, mourning mouths. I was standing amidst it all – still wearing an N95 mask – for no apparent reason.

“With wide, neatly laid roads and multi-storied apartments, Kannagi Nagar, off Chennai’s Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR), gives the illusion of a well-laid out residential colony. But under this veil is the raw life of its marginalized residents – ‘resettled’ here from various slums in the city between 2000 and 2010. The 1.25 lakh population of this neighborhood is forced to turn to criminal ways to meet their daily demands, as their address has been denying them employment for the past 17 odd years.”(The News Minute, December 07, 2017 ). I was thinking of how they were able to sustain themselves in this pandemic, where social distancing was the only vaccine available.

In the 6th month of my Fellowship, the very different and deep reality of the life of children and their families are being thrown open in front of me, destabilizing my understanding and learnings “in and about life”. Teaching me what being privileged is, again and again.

As I stand here bewildered, not knowing where to start, I see a child roaming in the street gathering experiences, understanding, and learning about life. Looking at her, I finally realize “Yes, I too am learning”.

Adithyan S

Jan 2021

Teach for India,Chennai.

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