In this time of extreme discomfort, comfort is the new catchword When 16 migrant workers, who had paused to sleep on the railway tracks on their 800km journey home on foot, were run over by a goods train last week near Aurangabad, many of us know people who, from the comfort of their memory foam mattresses, asked: “But why were they sleeping on the tracks?" So much for the news report that began with the plaintive line: “If this image doesn’t move you nothing will." The image was of the railway track, a mangled mess of clothes, chappals, blood—and some miraculously untouched rotis.
As a terrifying tidal wave of hunger and sorrow wash away the precarious livelihoods of large swathes of this country, we are too busy figuring out how to