The Dichotomy Between Fairness and Time

 

It is Day Two at the Jaipur Literature Festival. An afternoon, post lunch session is about to commence. The hustle and bustle is slowly settling in, the commotion is giving way to structure, and avid readers and fans are making their way towards their favourite authors’ sessions. I make way to mine, and some formidable planning meant that I could get a decent seat for the session (planning here, read as: carefully crafted festival itinerary, hand-written for each of the four days of the festival I attended, in a dedicated pocket diary, just like old times:P).

There are still a few minutes to the start of the session, enough for me to observe that the row in front of me had a well seated group of three young kids. One of the three suddenly pops from her seat, probably to grab something to eat. She is now well gone for five odd minutes, her peers have ‘booked’ her seat, and I suddenly hear a small shriek from one of the festival organisers. She is directing a lady with a young baby in her hand, towards the ‘empty’ seat, with a sort of relief in her voice finally becoming even more prominent. Now it gets tricky: the guy, like any true friend, starts defending the ‘empty’ seat. The lady silently stands there, neither fighting the seat, nor imposing the argument that an empty seat is meant to be taken at the first chance. 

But this scene transcends my neural organ into two chain of thoughts. Question one: by the principle of time, the girl and her friends occupied the seat first, and a mere detraction by a few minutes shouldn’t change the right of occupancy. Question two: by the principle of fairness, the lady who is responsible for her and her baby, has an equal right to any seat which is empty, considering the absence of any reservation concept officially promoted by the organisers of the festival.

This makes me delve into the larger dichotomy: is it fair for a hard working, brilliant mind to be born in a backward village, without access to basic facilities which he/she could have easily leveraged to build a life of their dreams.

Is it fair for our parents’ generation to be born in a time when they had to work ten times harder for a task which technology has made so easy to execute for our generation. 

Is it fair for females of my grandparents generation, who lost time and eventually their lives, living for their families and not for themselves, just because the concept of patriarchy hadn’t transcended for that generation. 

The author has finally taken stage, my thoughts are disrupted by the huge audience applause, the girl is back on her seat with a mojito, the lady and the baby settle on a seat, I stand there in the pandal with my brain missing the entire session of the author, one of my favourite ones, still confused about the dichotomy between fairness and time.