Necessity is a Privelege

"कभी-कभी रौशनी भी अंधेरे की तरह चुभ जाती है।”

There are days when you scroll through Instagram and watch other people's lives play out in ways that make yours feel insignificant. Someone just bought a car, someone's moving into a bigger apartment, someone's sharing their achievements with ease that makes you wonder what you're doing wrong. I especially have gotten into this habit of measuring my happiness by what's missing, by the gap between where I am and where I think I should be- which I think most of us do. It drains you after a while, the constant tallying of what you lack. But what happened today made me think back on the very fundamental way of how I see my own life. Our team, for a dayout, joined a drive organized by the IRADA Organization, and we visited a slum area in the city.

The Visit

Before we left our meeting point, I had constructed this entire mental image of what a slum would look like, pulled mostly from Slumdog Millionaire and fragments of documentaries I'd watched over the years. Part of me expected to encounter children with some inherent wisdom born from hardship, or some sort of peculiar charm you see in films or a picaresque novel. When we actually arrived, those fantasies wooshed immediately though, because what stood before us was an unedited human existence- people navigating conditions and living lives that any of us can’t sustain in.

The Joke

Before we entered, someone on the team made a joke about how since we were somewhat dressed up and not prepared for anything formal, we should just call some of the locals outside and hand over the donations from there. Everyone laughed because it was a harmless comment, but if you think about it, that casual remark says so much about the difference between their world and ours. We were standing right at the threshold, physically present, yet there was this vast psychological distance we were instinctively trying to maintain, a boundary that we didn't want to cross. These people probably perceive us the same way we perceive animals behind bars at a zoo-interesting to observe, strange, but ultimately belonging to a reality so different from theirs that connection is impossible.

Distance

Moreover , imagine living in a society that constantly speaks about democracy and equal rights, yet your daily experience has conditioned you to view even genuine attempts at help with skepticism. This response comes from a place of survival intelligence developed over generations of being overlooked, dismissed, and disappointed.

When we walked in carrying good intentions and packed donations, one thing I realized was that our presence might look less as some sort of an assistance and more as another reminder of the systematic denial they've faced their entire lives. Every time someone like us appears looking comfortable and composed, it reinforces the distance between what we have access to and what remains forever beyond their reach. The reaction has nothing to do with envy or resentment in the petty sense. It's more that we physically embody a world they've been locked out of, and our arrival, however well-meaning, makes that exclusion visible all over again.

The Children

The scene at the slum though was basically uncontained energy. Kids rushed toward us from every direction, laughing and shoutings, and actual physical fights erupted over packets of chips and secondhand shirts - genuine excitement over things I've trained myself to consider insignificant. These kids experience joy in a way that feels alien to those of us who've grown used to having our needs met before we even articulate them. What really got to me was watching some of them recite alphabets and numbers despite having little to no formal education. I kept circling back to the same thought: if someone gave them actual resources and consistent support, the trajectory of their lives could and would change entirely. The gap between them and anyone else has nothing to do with capacity or potential. It's purely about access, about who gets the opportunity to develop what's already there and who gets left behind before they even start.

We're the Privileged Ones

I've spent weeks complaining about work deadlines and feeling swamped under multitasking, treating my stress like it's the hardest thing anyone could possibly endure. Meanwhile, there are people who wake up every morning with genuine uncertainty about whether they'll have food by evening. In moments like these, you realize and understand how much of your own experience you've been misreading, how many layers of privilege you’ve been moving through without ever acknowledging they were there.

Leesa Di, our campus ambassador, who guided and supported us throughout this entire drive, kept emphasizing that showing up is just a step. The real challenge here is in maintaining that awareness long after you've returned to your comfortable life, in letting what you've seen actually change how you see the world instead of categorising it as just another fun experience you had once.

Back Home

When I walked through my door tonight, I went straight to the kitchen and ate the meal I'd been skipping all week because I've been trying to lose weight. I sat at the dining table for about an hour staring at nothing. The air conditioner above my head, the bed I was sitting on, the fact that I had food available to me that I could actually choose to refuse—these things I've been taking for granted my entire life are luxuries other people spend their whole existence trying to reach.

Necessity itself is a privilege. Gratitude starts when you stop treating your baseline as universal and recognize it for the extraordinary luck it actually is.

“हमने देखे हैं वो चेहरे जहाँ मुस्कान भी कर्ज़ में होती है।”

Because our normal is someone's dream.