A nice piece

by Shoba

An excerpt

Life hurts people. We all contend with loss — romantic disillusionment, job failure, and the daily pinpricks on our ego that serve to reinforce what the musician Sting calls “how fragile we are”.
The trick is to figure out how to come out smiling, if not all the time, at least enough to carry on — like my bhutta lady; like the scores of maids and auto-rickshaw drivers; and the vegetable vendors who grace us with their presence every day; who wake up every morning in abjectly poor circumstances and yet, have the courage and the chutzpah to face the world, to share a laugh while bargaining over the price of tomatoes, to carry on. To live.