Page 39 - #letter to son

#SangamNiti DAYLIGHT
response to bad credit. When I lamented the loss of the princely sum
of twenty-five hundred rupees inflicted to Bank of Dad, he merely
shrugged and said it was small price paid to learn a priceless lesson.
Thereafter, I almost memorised this: Cash is profit. Credit is loss.

While my father’s shop was a university, my mother’s farm was a campus
in open learning.

Life on a farm is never easy and the sheer hard work she sowed in
managing the ancestral 40-bigha land showed on her furrowed hands,
callused legs and steely eyes. When I think of it today, she had all the
successful traits of the greatest businesswomen in the world. She put
long hours at work, as much as 18 hours every day, yet brought-up
four children. She considered her job not merely as a much-needed
support to the family’s sustenance, but also as a means to cultivate
rural employment. She was a hard taskmaster, yet a brilliant human
resource manager. Her mind thought business but her heart reached
out to people. She freely gave food and distributed other household
necessities. She built bonds with her people that took deep root. She
was truly a daughter of the soil.

I never knew at that time that my parents’ occupations were actually
converging towards an agri-based network. While my father ran the
front-office, my mother worked the back-end. However, the roots that
held it all together, embraced it all in one bundle, was that they valued
people welfare above everything else. They were interested in their rural
brethren. They were invested in relationships.

When I think of this, and connect it to the current events, things are
as clear to me as daylight. Earlier, though life was difficult, it was never
distressful. Though we did not have much, we lived in abundance.

I began to wonder what has changed so drastically over the last few years,
as several days in the years of 2017 and 2018 were marked by chronic
nationwide farmers’ protests with reports of demonstrations turning
violent. Major metropolitan cities of New Delhi and Mumbai emerged
as battlefields with farmer groups pouring in by the thousands from

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