Mobile stores are abundant near Sigra in my city Varanasi. I don't want to present an essay on the title I gave to this story. Because I want to ask a question.
I visited some mobile shops at sigra region today as I needed a new phone of course. But I only analysed the prices and planned to buy later.
I talked to some very interesting guys and to my surprise I found one of my childhood friend there, working in one of the mobile stores.
We were delighted and talked at length. He offered me tea, milk one, over boiled and earthen pot served. He talked over the tea about Indian economy and Indian polity as if the media waited for his suggestions about how to grow market and boom economy.
Talking to those urban guys working in urban stores in urban areas felt kind of pilgrimage. Those stores, interiorly decorated by foreign phone companies, the work guys in uniforms or some in sharp casuals, lighting, tiles, glasses and air could swing anyone's mood and transform their inner attitudes to question their normal living.
Though these epiphanies might not manifest to other cool living popular people (demanding and criticising everything God gave them); but it is likely a revelation for us poor people living in a ghetto, constitutionally characterised minority (Other Backward Class), who are not even qualified to be called as bourgeois.
We earn though, we earn and we live well, we school and we entertain ourselves with TV and internet hence, we go to mobile stores to buy a phone. A smart phone around Rs. 20,000/-. But we won't call us middle class.
Most of the Indian population is like me. Pray, earn, eat, entertain, love, sleep, freshen up and repeat. Pray just to earn, earn just to eat, eat just to live and love just that your loved ones don't run away or rebel. For us freshen up just means cleaning and not enjoyment, relaxation or calmness.
Though normal Indian population is poor, they are the most religious and devoted yet none of their daily life activities is Zen in nature or follows it.
I earn more than those guys in those mobile stores, and have a bigger house or a house as contrary to some of them who don't have.Then why I look dull and unbathed, worked and drained, a patient and someone on break from his series of punishments while those guys looked really sharp, were well dressed and smelled good too. Their voices were clear and unwavering with language filled with posh words pleasing and motivating. I don't have an affinity for boys and this is not a romantic article.
I am poor. But there are poorer. And they work in those mobile stores which are no less high class window shops of London.
There in those mobile stores at Sigra, Varanasi, they did not look particular poorer but something else. From rich and big families, highly educated and philosophically advance. People, you wanna be friends with, hangout with them and travel. Why?
Perhap, the manufacturers wanted them to be that, fake high class bartenders of phones. A marketing strategy.
