The Search For An Answer- The Second

As people are walking all the time, in the same spot, a path appears.

-John Locke

A still of the narrow lane

I walked in the midst of the narrow lanes of the largest wholesale electronic market of Chandni Chowk and Asia, the Bhagirath Palace. This area being an imperfectly managed blend of electricals, surgicals, ayurvedics, interesting food flavours and also residences. This time I walked into these lanes in the search of a different something. I wanted answers. I wanted to communicate with those same faces, which were distinctly present in my memory. 

With my bag on my shoulder, my diary in my left hand and a pen in the other I walked with an aim of penning down everything I got to know about the place. I wanted to cover every aspect of research, not because it was assigned to me but because I was eager to learn more and more about and from that place. 

A man selling wooden boxes and planks

As I moved on, I asked shopkeepers, shop owners, workers and stall owners questions about them, their work, their area of occupation, the kind of people they dealt with each day and if they could make any change in Bhagirath Palace, then what would that be. Out of the many people that I approached, only a few agreed to answer my questions. The honesty and their struggle behind working in a place with such terrible ambiance appeared explicitly on their faces. These few people out of the many were friendly, generous and kind while the other few who were repelled by the idea of answering my questions, were insensitive, harsh and rude. 

An Ayurveda shop
that I interviewed

A few of the many people felt that the largest wholesale market of Asia should be well-developed in terms of their infrastructure, sanitation, security and drainage systems. Well I couldn't blame them because I faced the same problems in those two visits that I had paid whereas those people had to be a part of that place every second day of their lives. Of the twenty people that I had interacted with, more than half of these had been working in Bhagirath Palace for over two decades. It left me stunned when a few older men told me that they had been working there for over forty years and were very happy with the progress of that area, because in their early years there was poor scope for business but today because so many shops have opened in Bhagirath Palace they were able to earn a sufficient amount of money to provide for their families or their own livelihood. 

A juice vendor at Bhagirath Palace

As far as the problems were concerned, everybody answered my question by saying that there should be awareness amongst the people working here to not litter and to keep their area clean but at every step, every shop, the scrap, the unwanted materials were thrown outside while the shops were spotlessly clean. I watched people spit "paan" in front of me, I looked at them, they looked at me and looked down so I understood that they were aware of where they were going wrong. And that was enough for a start.

A still of the stare

I want to make a difference but I can't make it alone but that does not mean that I'm not going to try. 

It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.

-Mahatma Gandhi