Blind, Who?

A small incident that I witnessed a few days back had me pondering about a few things. At the end of those sixty seconds I was left wondering who really among us is blind.
Cars zoomed. Men and women scurried with their trousers and saris lifted like lungis revealing their ankles. The street was awake and alive with life. Yet everyone – the young and the wise, the educated and the uneducated seemed to be blind, or I should probably employ the usage dead…dead.
The broken nozzle of the tap, on the roadside, allowed the water to gush in a continuous fall creating an oasis in midst of tar expanse. Water! Water is the womb of every human settlement. Water is the cradle of human civilization. Water kicks off international disputes and rakes up regionalist sentiments. But yet when it comes to micromanagement of water, public accountability is amazingly abysmal. Sealing that tap needed nothing more than two hundred seconds of ones time. But bhai, aren’t we talking of India?!
I refuse to be an ally to such an appalling apathy. I turned towards the tap, took a couple of steps and stopped. A man with dark sunglasses on walked slowly towards the sound of flowing water. Yes, towards the ‘sound’ for he groped with a stick for direction. He was seeing the water flow down only through the sound that the confluence of earth and water makes. For blind people ears double up as eyes. He turned the tap turner to its left and reduced the flow of water. Then he removed his kerchief and tied around the gap through which considerable amount of water was still leaking. That sealed it. Everything was over in less than a minute or two. Yet the pool of water indicated that it had been flowing for at least half an hour. To me this person seemed like the only living soul among hordes of corpses in a cemetery. As he walked away, I was left wondering who really was blind.
Next time you see a street lamp competing against the sun to illuminate your locality take a couple of minutes to switch them off. Hold your saliva till you reach the nearest wash basin. Exercise some restraint on your excretory tendencies. Roads are not the dust bins for your garbage. Be the change that you want to see. Be not blind in your mind.