not unknown to him. Many had done that for several years. When in 1965, the first skyscrapper Ushakiran with 26 floors was built at Mumbai’s Malabar Hill, he was working in Mumbai and had seen several photos in newspapers showing opulent Ushakiran and the adjacent multitude of ugly slums, with caption highlighting the stark contrast. But that time it all seemed to him as ideological propaganda. Even while teaching at Kolhapur he had witnessed this gap between rural and urban students. But somehow earlier that contrast had not pinched his heart painfully. Perhaps that was so because he was then a part of “India” and it was in keeping with human nature to adhere to opinion which was suitable for oneself and discard the view that was unsuitable. But now the situation had completely reversed. Because of his own decision he was uprooted from earlier comfortable “India” and was thrown into suffering “Bharat”. The feeling that the “exploiter India” was responsible for his plight today was pricking in his heart like a sharp thorn. What lay in the city was “their India” and what lay in the village was “my Bharat”, he thought. The cause for that division was obvious to him. Earlier he had searched for it only intellectually but now he knew it from experience. It was the perpetually loss-making farming. Just a month ago he had sold his crop of onion for barely Rs. 20 a quintal. That was the market value of his hard labour of four to five months; 20 paisa a kilo! And this evening at the food stalls a note of Rs. 100 had just disappeared in a jiffy. There were certainly a lot of exploited people living in the cities as well, he was well aware of that. But he knew even those unfortunate countrymen or their parents had been farmers until recently and it was the starvation in the villages that had driven them to cities for survival. It was also possible that this “India versus Bharat” conflict Hands in Soil
Q
95
