The roadside economy in Delhi marts are a delight to watch – the sparkling lights and the melodramatic vista it offers is food for various thoughts. Not to forget the different characters of people you ought to meet – you get to know their journey of life, their predicaments and various struggles and situations they have passed through and have reached in front of you as you see them.
Life is demanding for everyone
and they are not special cases. I came across one such soul – “Anna” he likes
to call himself and is proud of his name and lineage, he is our roadside ‘South-Indian’
shop which caters to various people through its varied degree of mouth-watering
South Indian dishes.
In his early 50’s, Anna came as a
lad of 12 years in Delhi along with his family – all of four people. His
parents were moderately educated, and his sister was too young to go to school
at that time. Hailing from Tamil Nadu’s remotest of the villages, his father
set-up a roadside stall – just a table and a bench for people to sit and started
his ‘Entrepreneurial’ journey as the term is considered fag in today’s world of
aristocratic English!
For them, it was the dire need to bring food on the table for the family which led his father to take this plunge out of his mediocre savings. Anna tells me that he has continued the ‘Legacy’ of his father in all pristine mode and made this stall as a passion for a lifetime. “It is always an honor to uplift the gifts your parents bestow on you howsoever insignificant as it may look.” – That is the philosophy of life Anna follows. In the midst of passing years, he has established himself as a road-side eatery of repute, he swears by the quality of his Idli’s and Dosa’s and mouth-watering Sambhar which he himself cooks – once in the morning and once in the evening.
He takes this as a responsibility
to present before his customers the legacy of his father – who started this
shop when Anna was too small to help him. Anna ponders – “My father used to
work for 12-14 hours a day to make ends meet, be it sun, rain or cold, he was
adamant to stand under the makeshift umbrella and wait for customers. In those times,
there were not much roadside stalls, neither were there many customers!”
Though his Icon is no more, but
the keystroke life lessons bestowed by him has been well entrenched in Anna’s
philosophy of dialing living, the same has been passed on to his kids.
The tough times have seem to vanish
and Anna is all praise for the Almighty for his much mercy, now that he gets many
customers that on some days, his stall is inundated with long list of requests.
His both kids are doing jobs in reputed MNC’s – a fact that he is proud of and
his eyes lit up when he tells all of his story to his chatting customers.
A killing advise which Anna
always tells us all “Times always change, I have seen this in my own
life, One should always be humble and be obligated to the power of unknown.”
Well, Anna is not much educated
and lack many of the IT skills which we all flash but his wisdom is much ahead
of the bookish knowledge we all possess – no wonder we are entrapped in varied
degree of issues in our lives, with many of us chasing a chimera of false
aspirations and a dreamy success and lack internal contentment!
We will see many such Anna’s struggling to make ends meet, but they surely lack the grit and gumption to sail through vagaries of life with their own commitment and philosophy of life – time tells us that they have the real success mantra of life – “Patience” and “True belief in self and the almighty”, rest follows…
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