By Sakshi Venkatraman
Staff Writer
@oompapa1
The girl coming down the street looked about 8 or 9. She was skinny, short and was dressed in a tattered cloth that barely covered her. On her hip rested a baby, stark naked, with a bony spine and shoulder blades that protruded from his back.
Both of them were barefoot with dirt-caked skin, but they somehow exuded joy, despite their poverty.
The young girl held out her free hand and smiled up at me. “Akka?” she said, giving me the traditional Indian
formality of referring to me as “sister”. Moved beyond words I placed some spare change into her palm and struggled to reciprocate the same smile she had not lost since turning the street corner.
The thankfulness in her eyes made me want to pick her up, take her home, bathe her, clothe her and keep her forever. Yet the girl skipped away merrily, holding tightly to the money in one hand and the baby in the other.
Poverty: it is a sight I have seen before and one I will likely see many times more, but this particular incident struck me differently. I was flooded with emotions of guilt, sadness and admiration.
What shocks me every time is not the begging or the tattered clothing or the baby on the hip, it is the smile. The perpetual look of not only joy, but sheer satisfaction, that is seemingly tattooed onto the faces of these children who have nothing. The question I posed to myself that summer is, “Does the fact that they have nothing really mean that they have everything?”
Since I was a baby, I have spent time in India once every two years. Traveling has been such a unique and meaningful part of my life, yet I did not fully appreciate the quality and perspective it has given me until recently.
There was never a time I have been more self-aware than that moment; when that adorably out-of-place little girl begged me for money with nothing but a smile on her face. It was a moment of self-realization that has never been matched before, in my life, and it soon led to weeks of self-loathing.
Driving through the streets of India in my uncle’s air-conditioned car, I looked deeply at every child that meandered the crowded streets, stopping at cars occasionally to ask for money. They played in the dirt, on the sides of the road, with dolls missing limbs and hair and with empty water bottles.
They looked happy. And it was a type of glee that I have never seen on faces here. It was a genuinely child-like happiness, one free of Netflix and Crossy Road.
With all the reason they had to be resentful or dismal, they were satisfied. As for us, with all the reason we have to be appreciative and jubilant, we are constantly discontented with our life.
We are consistently tricking ourselves out of happiness by wanting the next best thing. As soon as we obtain our iPhone 5 we use it to research the iPhone 6’s release date. It is intrinsic, and getting rid of it is difficult, but what I learned through my experience overseas is that sometimes, all you need it an existential awakening.
The key to this problem is self-awareness and it is achieved by an individual alone. In a way, you have to force yourself to be happy and accept what you have for what it is. It is corny, but baby steps can be taken to ensure an upward trajectory. For example, keep your iPhone 5 instead of buying the iPhone 6. We, as a society, need to accept the fact that circumstances and items will never make us happy.
If you give a mouse a cookie, he will never be satisfied. There is an infinite amount of things to want and only a finite number of years in our lives.
Whenever I think of what I desire for myself in the future, I think of the children who play on the streets of India, the children who smile while they beg, the children who substitute material with emotion.
I want to be content. And if running full-speed after my happiness means abandoning the heavy chains of materialism on my way, it seems like the most worthy sacrifice a person can make.
