Arshid Malik
Inflation is probably the most popular and at the same time the most dreaded term on this planet. Soaring prices have pinned middle and lower class people to the ground and there is no getting away with it. The escalation of the general costs of living should somehow work parallel to the amounts of money that people earn, so that they have the edge to balance out their spending and earnings.
From what is going on now, it is more than eminent that middle and lower class people cannot even buy their children essential proteins in a few years time. Look at the price of potatoes, tomatoes, spinach in the vegetables arena and grapes, oranges and bananas in the fruits arena – very commonly used food stock in middle class kitchens – and other widely used edibles. I tell you some day your vegetable vendor is going to give you a heart attack when he announces with a creepy smile on his lips that the cost of one kilogram of tomatoes has gone up by 950 rupees.
What are we poor people going to do in the near future with inflation riding our backs like a backlit monster with green eyes? We are going to die of hunger and that is very plain yet so sick. How can that thing happen? And why should we accept such a future. We should not, at any cost, but what do we do about it when it is not in our hands but the Western elite. Our future is being decided in the darkest high rises of Washington DC and we are not audible to these elite while they are compartmentalized from the common world by 12 inches thick toughened bullet proof glass. They cannot hear the crying child who is going hungry for the past three days as his parents cannot afford to buy decent food for the baby in the poorest parts of India. This is capitalism spelt “cannibalism’ and we are the fodder for the money making machines.
Onions make you cry when you cut and slice them but nowadays the journey has been pre-poned. You do not need to walk to the flea market to buy onions and come home to slice them and cry, it takes place as soon as you buy them. The prices are such…
The question is how far can inflation go and how low can average incomes in this part of the world go. And there are no answers. All you can hear is the rebounding yells of the vendor shouting out the latest prices of oranges. If you buy your stuff yourself then you must be aware that oranges – very small ones, the size of average lemons – are being sold in the market at the rate of 120 INR. When you buy these oranges for 120 INR how much juice do you get out of them while 3-4 are almost dry inside? Strawberries grow on shrubs but the average cost of a 250 grams packet will make you weep in a corner.
Potatoes are traditionally known to make you fat – even though that is one big fad and the truth is that the way we prepare potatoes in our region adds the fattening stuff to the potatoes. We usually fry potatoes in oil and as potatoes are good absorbents they soak up a lot of oil and there is your culprit and sorry for the usual digression – but now potatoes thin you out given the price tags they come with. And apples, as far as I know, good variety ones were always costly and sold in Kashmir at around 40-50 rupees per kilogram. But now one single apple costs you more than 100 rupees just because of the reticent fact that these one bear a sticker label announcing them O.K. tested. Who on earth wants apples to be labelled O.K. tested, we are not talking about light bulbs here or are we?
The grapevine carries the word these days that raw green chillies are going to be sold at 2 rupees per piece in the very near future.
When we people are already burdened by the costs that deemed necessary implementations of the establishment incur how can we cope with the pressure of rising prices of edibles that just cannot be kept out? How can we win our way ahead when our present is bleak? And by the way what are we doing in this system. We should get out and shout at the high rises and sky scrapers so that perhaps someone would hear us yelling and register our protest. But they have thick sound proof walls and not even sunlight gets past them. By all means we are stuck in a cell. We are prisoners while we are free. We are kept and sometimes tamed. And there is no known way that carries the message of our escapade.
