9 years and 9 hundred individuals. Hours of fieldwork in a world of sweatshops, slums, and police stations situated within the working-class coronary heart of the capital. That’s what it took journalist Neha Dixit to put in writing her beautiful, just-out non-fiction ebook The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian.
In a time when the cult of emerald-wearing celebrities distracts us from most issues actual, no one needs to know in regards to the lives the poor lead. Early in her profession, one among Dixit’s editors advised her to focus her reporting on the goal viewership—male, metropolis slicker, wealthy—and avoid ‘bleeding coronary heart’ tales. The ebook’s narrative is interspersed with key occasions which have occurred in India because the Nineteen Nineties. They function a stark reminder that even because the wealthy are capable of entry extra, purchase extra, stay grander lives in larger towers, and witness a rustic remodel, completely nothing modifications for almost all of residents. The truth is, the divide solely deepens. As Dixit observes in direction of the tip of her ebook, “The wealthy and poor now not coexist. They don’t share areas any extra.”
Many of the movies and books we devour depict the lives of the highest one p.c of Indians virtually like the remainder of the nation doesn’t exist—even the so-called ‘genuine’ small city movies which have been fashionable for a couple of years now don’t stray wherever close to the hundreds of thousands of Indians who stay with none sources and with zero help from the state. The final two narrative non-fiction books I learn in regards to the city poor that moved me as a lot as Dixit’s work did have been Aman Sethi’s A Free Man and Katherine Boo’s Behind the Lovely Forevers, each printed earlier than Narendra Modi got here to energy in 2014. In Dixit’s ebook, Modi’s India is a key protagonist alongside Syeda, Dixit’s never-say-die titular character, who moved from Benaras to Chandni Chowk in 1995 after post-Babri riots broke out in her metropolis.
She went in a single day from being a chatterbox to being monosyllabic, from being the spouse of a talented Benarasi weaver to a ‘home-based’ migrant employee. For such unskilled employees, not even accounted for by the state, the wages could possibly be as little as a thousand rupees for 14–16 hours of labor. Dixit quotes the 2006 Arjun Sengupta Committee report that discovered 93% of all non-agricultural employees in India work within the unorganised sector. In city areas, 96% of girls employees are a part of the casual sector, which accounts for 50% of the nationwide product. There are 80 million ladies like Syeda who do home-based work however will not be counted as ‘employees’. All of us have met a model of Syeda, and Dixit reveals you this nation via their eyes.
