This out of the way at the start: today's column is not about some major current political issue. It won't offer you a single figure, not one quote from some forgettably quotable person. Today, I'm writing about something I saw that has obsessed me for a few days, and I'm going to let the writing take the column where it will.

Here's a thing I like to do. While I feel mildly shamefaced admitting it, I'm betting a number of you like to do it too. You know those little ketchup packets you get at fast food restaurants? After I tear one open and squeeze its contents onto my food, I steal a quick look around to see that nobody's watching. Then I sort of pull the thing through my lips, sucking at it, squeezing the last drops into my mouth.

Well, the other day I found someone doing something similar. Only, it wasn't ketchup packets. She was working with larger plastic bags that had evidently been used to carry food. The bags in which my home-delivered Chinese food come, for example. When I empty them, they look a lot like the ones in the small collection this lady had on her lap. Picking them up one by one, she was sucking at them, swallowing the last few drops of whatever gravy they had contained.

You don't really need me to explain this, do you? Dressed in rags, the woman sat on the street not far from where I live, next to a pile of garbage from which she had extracted the bags. The gravy from the bags was her dinner.

Must have been a home-delivery bonanza that day. Not only in the sense that there was an abundance of thrown-away bags in the garbage dump, but also in the sense that they were home-delivered to her. You get my drift.

Visit any garbage heap -- and in Bombay, you never have to go far to stumble over one -- and you will too often find someone digging through it for food. Someone who, much like you, is another human being. The steaming, putrid dump on the road to Bandra station? Hurrying past two days ago, I saw another woman and two filthy pigs rooting around in it. The monsoon-soaked one at the other end of Carter Road? In a mounting downpour last week, three kids in bare feet picked little edibles out of it. And there's the lady with the plastic bags, draining Chinese take-out gravy into her mouth.

India. It makes you look at so much misery. Every day. You can look away if you want to, and we all learn that specific and very useful skill early. But you can't escape it even if you want to. Because that woman, you see, she doesn't really give much of a damn for your sensibilities, your carefully learned skills. She will go right on picking through the trash for plastic bags to suck on. It's been happening for years, and it will keep right on happening for many more years. Whether the country suffers through a hollow socialism, or a greatly hyped liberalisation, or an empty Hindutva, or a so-called globalisation, or a meaningless secularism -- whatever the ism that's currently fashionable to discuss or glorify or trample, one thing never changes. In India, you never have to search hard to find misery.

How long have squalid hovels lined the road and railway near Mahim station, their occupants picking their way over stinking pools of black goo to fill pots from leaky drains on a nearby building? How long have you had to be sure to drive carefully near such hovels at night, for otherwise you might run over entire families who sleep right there on the filthy road? How long
has it been that pairs of skinny, undernourished children sit outside fancy shops and restaurants in any Indian city, imploring passers-by for a few coins even though they are probably too young to comprehend what they are doing?

In my case, it has been over three decades. These have been common Indian sights going back to my earliest memories, common since I first became aware, in my single-digit years, that they even existed. And as my son becomes aware of them today, it burns me like a white-hot flame to think that they will almost certainly still be common when he has grown thick-waisted like me.

Just as common, of course, are the excuses and rationalisations and articulate reasons, not forgetting the questions and denunciations. Don't hold your breath as I rattle drearily through them, you've heard them all before. Here we go:

Don't you know, there are poor people even in the West? You're just a commie. You hate India. You don't want to see anything positive in the country. Why don't you move to Pakistan? You are an anti-national and you hate India. It was the socialism of the Congress -- or Kaangress, which supposedly adds scorn -- that did all this, just wait and see how India develops now that they are gone. Poverty is decreasing, can't you see the cars everywhere, the first-class highways we build for them? We're going to be another Singapore! And did I mention that you hate India, you pinko?

You have heard them all. Because these are more lessons from that education you and I got as we grew up Indian: ways to teach ourselves to look the other way. Yet none of these goes one step towards tackling the issue that has dogged us through our history, which is to ensure that all Indians get an equal chance at a dignified life. All Indians, meaning the bag-chewing lady as well. Maybe meaning the bag-chewing lady first.

Let me submit to you a thought. We are proud indeed of the rise of Indian entrepreneurs on the world's wealth charts, to the point that Azim Premji was for a time the world's second-richest man. But what about the man at the other end of that spectrum, the world's second-poorest? The poorest? Are they Indian too? Is that a matter for pride? Why not? Hold that thought as I submit another to you: the poverty we tolerate in India blights more lives -- orders of magnitude more -- than does terrorism, or a mosque in Ayodhya, or our absence from the UN Security Council, or the lack of a thousandth statue of Ambedkar or Shivaji. Than all those combined. Yet each of those fires our passion and outrage more -- orders of magnitude more -- than somebody's mother, somebody's sister, somebody's wife, sucking on discarded plastic bags.

When will this -- the outrage, the poverty -- change?

You think this is a pointless lament, and maybe you're right. Maybe it is. But what I really mean it to be is a call to arms. I'm as indifferent to claims of past glories as I am to visions of future magnificence. What interests me is the here and now. So if, starting today, we begin tackling that issue I mentioned -- the effort to give every Indian a chance at a dignified life -- the future will take care of itself.

That has innumerable dimensions, but prime among them is the need to take our country back from the gang that has hijacked it over the last half-century. Whether they have claimed to be socialists or right-wingers, they have shared one thing: a broad indifference to the struggle so many Indians must endure just to get through each day. I don't mean indifference from just our leaders here. I mean opinion-makers, decision-takers, writers, people who formulate and implement policies, ordinary folks. I mean you and me.

I'm saying, let's take our country back from everyone who thinks a fellow citizen mining our garbage for food is an acceptable sight in India. From everyone who has grown up to look the other way.

I'm saying, let's make that woman who sucks plastic bags matter.


You can send your comments to me at dilipd@rediff.co.in