Elite Penury

As kids, our trips to the Ramakrishna beach at Vizag defaulted munching into roasted corn ears. The other delicacies of those days on display by the beach hawkers were puffed rice mixture and clean-cut slices of raw mango sprinkled with a rainbow of spices. The corn ears dressed in that secret spicy mix was magic to the taste buds of us kids.

Life moved on with an uprooting from Andhra to my hometown in Kerala. We missed the sights and smell of those favorite beach snacks. Last week en route my daily commute, I was surprised to see a big heap of raw maize ears beside a roadside fruit vendor. It was a never before rare sight at my place. 

How come such an abundance of corn all at once? And that too at a place where neither it is a staple nor a snack? Somewhere along the consumer end, few links were missing. It didn't take much time for me to figure out. Lockdown measures had halted all cinema theatres, multiplexes, and lo all the popcorn lay strewn all over the street as maize ears.

Speaking of popcorn, what comes to my mind is the helpless mutual glance at the multiplex food counter. The vendor boy who is earning his daily wages looks helplessly as the daddy of the family digs deep to shell out a fair share to buy the overly priced popcorn to make his kids happy. I fear does God know what the farmer is getting? 

In the nineties, we were taught in economics that agriculture is the backbone of the Indian economy. Much has changed in economics and governance, but nothing for the Indian farmer whose clans are dwindling in numbers since I closed my economics textbook post-exam in the early nineties. 

Do we think of them who are always at the receiving end, be it flood, drought, or pandemic, as we have progressed to stages where the first English alphabet reminds us of a gadget and not of a fruit.