The happy blind beggar family

Quite sometime back - I was waiting for my train at the platform of Asansol junction - for you, its a decadent industrial town trying a desperate facelift and, as it happens with all of us at old age refusing to let youth go, its neither here nor there. Indian platforms, in case you have time in hand and a relaxed, fatalistic, innate 'Indian-ness' in you, are great podia to watch live, unedited reality shows.
With a little luggage to be cautious about and a train that was not to appear in the meandering horizon of railway lines for another hour, I was immersed in myself watching clippings of different lives - families counting luggage pieces and members, lovers fighting silly over some failed appointment, hawkers vending magazines, snacks, tid-bits - not an idle time-pass I can say.
Then they emerged. From the other end of the platform, a desolate, lifeless end merging into the dusty sidewalks to wilderness, I saw this couple. A beggar couple with their 5-7 year old daughter. The couple was blind, but were laughing over some personal jokes, the girl guiding the parents to the platform - it was a start of another day of ordeal for them, or so we 'muggles' would perhaps think in indulgent compassion - that moment it seemed a happy little family, so rare in our own cliche-ridden intelligentsia 'we should have got more' circles. It was just a happy family snippet that we often 'pose' for under friendly requests or when we are tourists - natural, giving two hoots to that son of the gun called 'destiny'. Laughing out of a divine conspiracy? Who knows! But the scene was a pure moment of bliss and got etched in my mind forever. Whenever I am dead grounded, I remember that family and life pours in.

Pagol saanp - lodo khelchhe bidhataar songe

" The mad vagabond is playing sankes and ladders with the Almighty" - a song by Suman, bengali ballad singer, now a Member of Parliament - why can't this man see sense and stick to his songs? What prompts such brilliant artiste this dalliance with politics?