Crossing the Mirage:Passing Through Youth

But then, realizing that his home soil was too limited to nourish his growing plant-of-ambition, two years back, he moved over to Bombay to become someone-in-the-street. Though he came to sniff the commercial scent of the metropolis-of-opportunities, soon enough, the lack of any capital confined him to life's square one. However, he saw that while Bombay's rich ruled the business world from the mansions, the pavements nursed the ambitions of the poor. Well, they tended to help the enterprising to make it good in double quick time.

When he saw his path to riches through the pavement, he prowled the sprawling metropolis to locate a foothold on a business-layak one. And in the suburb of Sion, he did discover, what he thought was a vantage point. Soon enough, he made the square his own by selling hosiery by the day and sleeping there by the night. As his perseverance paid off, he soon started to eke out an income enough to sustain his dreams all the while envisioning the horizons to which hosiery might take him.

Sex, realized Rashid, sold in more ways than one, and in lingerie he saw the ladder of his success. Well, but it was the position that fetched a price for the maal, be it a sexy stuff or the fleshy kind. And selling lingerie on a pavement amounts to street-walking for soliciting, and to the same affect, isn't it? Well, it has to be a mall to lend class to the maal. But, in Bombay, as he could see, there was a via media in the kiosk, which had an aura of its own to entice the classes when it came to the phoren maal. Thinking that he zeroed in on the USP for success, he searched for access to the recess of the charmed wares.

When he broached the topic with Ashok, in whose father's garment factory he once worked as a salesman, the latter thought it was an idea. Ashok contended that the homespun hosiery was devoid of design to impart class to attract the classes. Thanks to the Nehruvian legacy of the socialistic pattern of growth, the society was bred on "equality of inequality‟ and the bazaar became bereft of quality. All those imposts on imports meant to protect the swadeshi stuffgave cause for the callous industrial culture. All this induced mediocrity in the market and that deprived goodies of quality to the doomed citizens of our socialist state. However, in time, as human proclivity tends to gravitate towards the good things of life, market forces opened up smuggled routes to provide the alluring to the affording.