Legions In the Mud • India 2013

Several years ago a young Indian journalist working for a newspaper in New Deli was assigned by an editor to do a story on the rise of a prosperous middle-class in India, increasing dramatically in number and beginning to have a widespread impact on the country‘s economy. 

The journalist, himself a member of that class, interviewed people in various towns and cities across the central part of the country, seeking their views on how this new prosperity had improved their lives. Their remarks led him to go farther afield and gather stories from Indians in the countryside, and discover the way this great change was effecting them.

One afternoon he visited a large manufacturer of pottery and bricks. Much of the work was outside and apart from the buildings where clerical and sales employees were protected from the weather as they went about their tasks. The men and women actually making the clay used for the company‘s products worked in the open or in sheds without walls, using tools and methods that hadn‘t changed for generations.

The journalist approached a worker shoveling clay into a wheelbarrow. Although not much older than the journalist, the worker seemed middle-aged. His clothes were drenched with sweat; his shoes and trousers, his arms and hands, were caked with mud. When the journalist asked his usual questions, he was immediately made uncomfortable by an unblinking glare directed at him, an almost palpable anger emanating from the worker.

Silence. Then, as the journalist was about to try to persuade the man to talk to him, the man spoke, his voice harsh and forceful. 

He said, ”You understand nothing. What you say has nothing to do with us. We are born in the mud. We live and work in the mud. We will die in the mud.” He returned to his work. When the journalist began to speak, the man only said, ”Go away.”

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This is the fate of the vast majority of the human race. The kind of work varies in detail; the condition in which it takes place varies in detail. They struggle every day of their lives in ways ignored and unacknowledged by many who should know better. They should be recognised as those critical to the survival of the human race. They should be honored. They are what I call the Legions in the Mud.

Perdition to those trying to keep them there.