Shikha

i have been watching and listening to his media bites again and again. i don't know mohammad irfan personally. but every time he speaks, he leaves behind a silence that's difficult to shake off. he represents an india that millions still inhabit. the india beyond our metropolitan bubbles, beyond expressways, airports and glass towers. the india of villages, slums and forgotten settlements, where deprivation isn't an exception; it's inherited. generation after generation. what moves you isn't just the hardship he describes. it's the complete absence of bitterness. there is no self-pity, no performative anger, no attempt to sensationalize his pain. he speaks with remarkable dignity, asking for things that should never have been extraordinary in the first place. good schools, functioning hospitals, decent roads, employment, clean water and a life of dignity. and he isn't asking only for himself. every sentence carries the weight of countless others whose lives look exactly like his. perhaps this is also why debates around reservation often miss the point. reservation was never designed to compensate for poverty alone. it exists because generations of social exclusion have produced generations of unequal opportunity. merit does not emerge in a vacuum. it is shaped by the school one attends, the nutrition one receives, the neighbourhood one grows up in, the discrimination one faces and the opportunities one is denied. when disadvantage itself is inherited, equality cannot be measured only at the finish line. and his story is not merely about economic hardship. it is about what decades of unequal development look like through the eyes of someone who still manages to smile. he speaks without ideology or slogans. he simply narrates life as he has lived it. and somehow, that simplicity makes his words far more powerful than any political speech. when the interview ends, nothing really ends for mohammad irfan. the cameras leave. the headlines move on. social media finds its next outrage. but he returns to the same road, the same neighbourhood, the same uncertainty and the same struggle that his parents lived with before him. the real tragedy is not that mohammad irfan has a story to tell. the real tragedy is that his story is so painfully ordinary. there are millions like him across this country whose names we will never know, whose lives will never become headlines, and whose children may inherit the very same struggle. not because they lack courage or hard work, but because they were born into a reality they never chose.