the one at that Pune School. The children in Pune looked like children from the advertisement of Bournvita or Horlicks – smart, chubby, welldressed and children there in Ambethan were so shabby, famished, full of scabies, wearing tattered clothes. The imposing building of the Pune school and the village school with just one teacher, one room and leaking roof. The large swimming pool here and the dried up wells there. The road that took him to the Pune school from his home was already smooth but was still resurfaced and made even smoother by spending a few lakh rupees just the year before, only because the convoy of the President of India was to travel on it for a day when he was attending a function. And that dirt road at Ambethan which was built ten-twelve years ago by villagers with shramadaan (voluntary labour) and which was full of potholes and always used to get so muddy every monsoon that while walking your feet would get muddied up to ankles. He felt, Pune and Ambethan were like two different nations; very distinct from each other without any bond to connect them. He knew there was vast difference between Switzerland and India but he realized that the difference between Pune and a village like Ambethan, barely forty kilometers away, was even greater. There was one flag, one President, one national anthem – prima facie everything was the same. But financially, our nation was divided into two halves. One part thrived on the exploitation of the other. It continued to exploit and the other continued to get exploited. He thought, the part that exploited was “India” and the part that got exploited was “Bharat”. This kind of representation of India’s extreme inequality was 94
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Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage
