Strike

There’s been a hike in oil priced lately, and the people of India are mad (isn’t everyone?). These people are so mad, in fact, that they have, over the course of less than a week declared several strikes.

Strikes are relatively common here. The buses go on strike, the shop owners go on strike, the students at the colleges go on strike. It seems like something the people of India just really like to do. And the random strikes aren’t a huge deal. But when the state or the country declared an all-inclusive strike event, the story changes a bit. That is what has been happening recently.

On Friday, there was an all-Kerala strike. Across the state, shops and schools were all closed. Bus, taxi, and rickshaw drivers all got to stay home. A few random restaurants stayed open, hoping to make a buck off the hungry people who found they had the day off, but most of them (even the really big ones) were closed. The only thing running was the rail system, but what good does that do when you can’t get a ride to the station? Well, I ended up walking – a good hour with a big bag trailing behind me. It was worth it for what awaited me (see previous blog), but it was a long, hot hour pulling that overstuffed bag down the streets of Aluva.

That was Friday, and, by Tuesday I probably would have forgotten all about it, except that they announced another strike! This time it was an all-India strike. So, the same rules apply, only they apply to the whole country, not just one isolated state. And it wouldn’t have been that huge of a deal to me, except that I was planning on traveling on Tuesday (I’d gone to visit Erin after the Varkala trip). Of course, I could have taken a train back home, but there was no way to get to or from any rail station, and I just didn’t want to do one of those long walks, pulling that bag behind me, twice in one day.

So, I stayed at Erin’s an extra night and took a rickshaw, then a train, then a bus back to Chacko Homes earlier today. The strikes are irritating (I mean, what do you do when you get a crazy craving for banana chips on a day when every single shop is closed???), but they’re also just a part of life. Plans change, schedules rearrange, trains are late, and strikes happen. People go on with their lives, showing us, once again, that, at the end of the day, it’s really no problem! And hey, it really was no problem staying at Erin’s. We had a good time, complete with some candy that had come recently from the U.S. and a small bag of banana chips that we were able to find at one very randomly open shop on Tuesday afternoon.