A mouthful of poison!

That's what I get when I am in an auto, stuck in a traffic jam at Nehru Place,Chirag Dilli, Moolchand intersection, Kotla signal... or wherever. The level of the auto is uniquely placed to ensure (guarantee?) that its passenger gets the full benefit of all the fumes belched out by cars, buses, mobikes, other autos - CNG be damned - trucks, you name it... any and every vehicle that is attached to a combustion engine. And I wonder...
I am surrounded by the hundreds and thousands who are at the receiving end of such emmisions. Walking on the roads, residing on the pavements, earning their living selling magazines and pushing carts, riding in over-crowded buses and, like me, in autos... and I wonder: what do they think, these have-nots, of the haves riding by in their cool, comfortable and protective air conditioned chariots?
Have they ever been exposed to the cacophony of horns (blown continuously), screams, shouts, gears crashing, motors whining, screeching tires, braking lorries and shouted invectives that fill the atmosphere around us - but against which they are safely cocooned? No, of course not! Otherwise, how could they look so cool and unconcerned and uncaring and disdainful (yes, disdainful!) behind the tinted windows of their multi-lakh cars?
Do they ever consider rising up, a la the Russians in the 1917 Revolution, and turn on the rich and the uncaring? Do the haves ever realise that this ever-growing, in your face, flaunting of wealth and privilege will, if not corrected some time soon, blow up in their faces in a vitriolic out-pouring of rage, resentment and envy?
Every age, every nation, every society has its haves and its have-nots... but if we consider the world today, very few have it in such close juxtaposition as we do. In our metros one crore rupee cars scrape shoulders with the rickshaw pullers; 17 crore helipads tower over the poorest of the poor, in shanty towns that are a moral indictment on any decent society. Do the haves even know the least thing about the squalour that surrounds them? Have they the faintest idea of the damage and poison that the riders in autos and cycles and pedestrians are exposed to?
Of course not. We are all depending on the age-old, traditional conditioning (that word again!)that the have-nots have been imbued with since time immemorial: this is our karma, it is written, it is our destiny to live our lives this way, we were born to this as were our forefathers - so be it. But, and this is a BIG but, India today is not the India that has been... young India will not not be so patient and long suffering. They have seen the other side and they want their rights. The right to a better life... amongst the haves. And they won't be shy about getting their way, by force if necessary. It's just a matter of time...