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Doaba Has A Dream —
It Is to Run Away
WSN Bureau
 Sixty-year-old
Jaswinder Singh tries his level best to hold back the tears as
henarrates at his house the pathetic saga of what his young son
Manjit Singh was going through in distant Prague. His younger son
Gurdip is heart-broken. Just as we take leave, father and son start
sobbing again.
“What happened to Manjit should not happen even to one’s enemies,”
said the father. It was time for one final question. “Had you too
ever thought of going abroad?” we ask Gurdip, and are stunned by the
answer. “What do you think I will do here. Of course I would go. May
be through a different travel agent.”
By
now, it has become a deeply ingrained characteristic streak in the
minds of Doaba youth that the only plausible way of making it big in
life is to go abroad. Europe is like a fortress, with a pot of gold
lying inside ready to be grabbed, and it is no more impregnable but
continues to be difficult to breach.
Virtually everyone in Doaba has heard the Malta stories. Stories of
the infamous shipwreck in the icy Ionian sea in 1997. Ironically,
lest Malta memories scare away a prospective immigrant, it is the
travel agent who brings up the saga. “Ours is a fool-proof
guarantee. Not like agents who will kill your son in Malta,” one
family was told by Ajmer Singh, the travel agent accused by families
of number of youth now stuck in Prague and elsewhere. The youth who
went looking for destiny in distant land they know frighteningly
little about hail from families which are certainly not poor.
Jaswinder Singh lived in a nice spacious house which had parking
place for his new tractor.
He
owns over 20 acres of land, and does not have many liabilities but
his son still wanted to go to Europe. “It is nothing but the lure of
lucre, big time moolah. I know that, but who does not need money or
want more of it, particularly when you see so many of your
neighbours bringing oodles of it home,” said father of another youth
who also went through the nightmarish experiences and has not heard
from his son for over a month now.
It
is easy to understand his argument when one drives along Banga,
awanshahr, Behram,Phagwara, all on way from Chandigarh to Jalandhar.
Eightbedroom houses, palatial mansions with gleaming jumbo-size
vehicles parked inside dot the countryscape. NRI’s visiting home
command a special respect in the village, as they often contribute
significant amounts for projects in the region. It is not keeping-upwith-
the-Jonses syndrome. It is much more than that. The choice, as they
see it, is between being a nobody and a dollarman. Consider the case
of
Ramanpreet Sidhu (not his real name).
On
one of his cousin’s visits home from Germany, he watched him with
awe as the first thing the NRI visitor bought was a Tata Safari.
Sidhu accompanied him across Punjab as he went visiting relatives,
and lavished them with costly gifts. None of it was lost on Sidhu
who chucked his studies and went looking for ways to go to Germany.
Four years later, he is frustrated, still unemployed but rather more
determined. So much so that he joined a shortduration journalism
course run by a German scribe in Jalandhar and has learnt German –
all in the hope of making it there someday.
“The ‘lure of lucre’ argument is just one aspect, though very
potent, in this game where youth are transported as human cargo into
land of milk and honey and left to mint money by doing mostly menial
jobs. It is hightime someone starts looking at the other aspect, the
job opportunities which are simply not there, the ever-declining
incomes from the agri-sector,” said Gurmit Singh Palahi, principal
of Community Polytechnic near Phagwara and known for his
community-management skills. The law’s long arm has often failed to
stem the tide of fly-bynight travel agents who operate from
makeshift offices in towns across Punjab, though it would take only
a couple of decoy customers to blow the lid off.
“In most cases, the travel agent keeps promising that the ‘cargo’
would reach ‘its’ destination while for the family, the agent is the
only hope. Police, going by their track record in bringing such
cases to book, does not exist as an option,” admitted a senior
police official. People in Punjab’s village make no bones about
their psyche regarding the foreign shores. “You see the watertanks
in the shape of a big aeroplane atop some big NRIs’ houses on the
way.Well, that is what my mind always keep thinking about.,” says
23-year-old Buta Singh in Khatkar Kalan, the ancestral village of
martyr Bhagat Singh who went to the gallows seventy years ago to
make sure the people don’t suffer from slavery of the West.
27 September, 2006
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