Livelihood...

This is a picture which I took randomly at my native place (Sirsi, South Canara North Canara dist. in Karnataka) when I visited there last winter.
The scene would be rather similar in almost all the houses during the winter.
These are raw Arecaunuts (also called Beetelnut) which is grown extensively in those areas.
The processing requires immense hardship which starts exactly during the biting cold month of December.
Plucking the riped nuts, peeling the skin (which goes on till mid night), boiling it in low flame throughout the night (the container which is used for boiling can be seen the photo), colouring and ultimately drying these nuts in the sun till March end.
These are the peak months of the year where everyone is busy and all their hard work pays-off.
This post is a salute to all those who undergo all these hardships including my father.

"He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cat who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly- yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. "Don't ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard"! "Don't argue, obey!" "Don't try to understand, believe!" "Don't rebel, adjust"! "Don't stand out, belong!" " Don't struggle, compromise"!"

Once again, from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.