You meet words like you meet people. Away from home, all of a sudden, sometimes accidently. Some words enter your life when you make effort – like you trying to make effort to make new friends at a new place. Some words meet you around the corners of streets, purchasing vegetables from the same vendors which you visit on weekends.

We all have our prized stories of learning certain words. Some are funny, some are painful, some are even embarrassing. But all those stories, all those funny, painful, embarrassing occurrences, earn you words as if they were friends. You treasure those words, use them with fondness, and they become your best weapons. Words – those little building blocks of language – language that is common to us, but at the same time everyone’s unique tool chest.

Here I share six words that I cherish the most among my treasury, and how they introduced themselves to me.

1. Diligence.

I first met the word “Diligence” at Punjabi University, Patiala in the summer of 2019. I was visiting the campus with someone, and we happenned to stop by a professor who knew the person I was accompanying. We sat in her office for half an hour. I was introduced to the professor as a boy who had completed a work assigned to me well in time. Her remark was a two-word sentence, but full of conviction, “Hmm, diligence!” I befriended the word there and then. It has travelled with me all these years, and if someone asks today one virtue a student must possess, I will jump up, “Hmm, diligence!”

2. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

Nicknamed as P-45, I met this word at school. Schoolboys usually boast of such unique knowledge, which is otherwise not too useful in the everyday course of life, be it the longest word in the English language, or the name of the oldest religion. At one time, you were a highly respected guy in the class if you could pronounce the full word, or spell it correctly. A biology teacher once gave us an assignment of presenting a PowerPoint presentation on any virus in the world. The only rule was the time limit of 10 minutes. A friend actually took the pain to research P-45, and made a ppt with the first slide containing a string of 45 letters:

PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS

He ended up convincing us that it was actually not such a rare disease, and there were really more cases of P-45 in the world than the number of letters it had.

3. Enthusiasm.

To be honest, my first greeting to enthusiasm wasn’t too enthusiastic. At HVM Convent School, there used to be a ten-minute free period after the school ended, in which all classes were dispersed one by one. This was a highly precious time – you could get up from your seat and walk to anyone’s place and talk to anyone – all this while the teacher was still in the class. There were debates, there was shouting, and there was clamour. On occasions, teachers posted on duty in corridors, came to class to gossip with class the in-charges.

One such day, some friends and I played a game, sort of, in which we had to ask each other tricky questions. At such an age, our vocabularies were quite insufficient, so asking the meaning of a new word was a valid riddle. One friend asked the meaning of “enthusiastically”. Replying to faces who had no clue, he explained it as a mixture of “joy” and “excitement” and “interest”. I didn’t like the word, of course, because it was long – it looked so sophisticated, and had a strange, cold aura about it. But it didn’t take long to get familiar with it. It took time to build enthusiasm for enthusiasm, but there are friends who become friends because you see them too much, that you can't restrain befriending them.

4. Intuition.

I was always confused about intuition because of the “tuition” in it. I continued to associate it with schooling and education for a long time.

Once upon a time, I was preparing a presentation on “Moral Values”. I bumped into this word yet again while surfing, and finally decided to look it up in the dictionary (sometimes you are so scared of or annoyed by a word that you don’t want to look it up in a dictionary!). A bit of exploration and I reached some website which described intuition as something like this: “You have a hidden, wiser voice inside you. Sometimes it is muffled, yes, but it’s always there. Sometimes an answer comes to you from this voice – and you are surprised by how it came. That part, that familiar voice – that is intuition.”

Suddenly, I had an intuitive understanding of intuition and added it to my vocabulary. Now I happen to use it a lot.

5. Opportunity Cost.

The fifth one is a term, not a word per se. As a student of Economics throughout my high school, I have been bumping into this word quite often. But it was like that boy in your school you see quite often, also know his name, but do not understand that much. He’s quite nice, but you’re just afraid to talk to him, or be near him, as there’s some mystery about him. All seem to be rubbing well with it, except you. I always knew opportunity cost as “Value of the next best alternative foregone”, and my teacher always explained it with this example:

“A farmer chooses to plant wheat; the opportunity cost is rice plantation that he could have done with the same money.”

I couldn’t, despite explanation, figure out for a long time that if the farmer already has chosen the “most profitable” wheat to be grown, how does a calculation of the “next best alternative” come to serve any value?

And then I accidentaly - thankfully - struck into a Seth Godin blogpost with the same title. When you are sitting and spending your time on YouTube, it comes with an opportunity cost – you could have been working on some pending project. This suddenly called to mind the understanding that the “next best alternative” might actually be better than the task we are choosing to do. Maybe wheat is not still the best option, and by growing wheat what “best” thing you are crossing out – be it one rung higher or lower in value – is the opportunity cost. That little piece of knowledge, which cleared the understanding between the word and me, closed the deal. As expected, I was wreathed in smiles. Thanks, Seth Godin :)

6. Eg and ie.

Two expressions, but let’s keep them under one head. I handshaked with these much before my peers did. GK books were a part of the curriculum since junior classes, but mostly no one took them too seriously (in many cases, not even the GK teachers!). That was mostly because these books just talked about raw facts – say, ten tallest mountains in the world with their heights, ten famous sports players in the words - without any context. No doubt, despite this, they were interesting to read, but not so riveting that you sat to memorise the details.

One such book contained a chapter on abbreviations. Eg and ie sat there like two little cute twins. They sat innocently among those pages, unaware of the atrocities in the world, oblivious to the the wonders of science and technology, and looked at me with glossy eyes. I first read their Latin full forms – exampli gratia and id est. I showed it to my benchmates, but they found this tasteless. But the abbreviations stayed at the back of my mind. I had a fun time quizzing my classmates in all schools I went to (I got to study in 3 different schools in 5 years, and 5 in 12) about the full forms of these two. Eg, when I asked a group of boys about this, they were surprised that these carried actual full forms, and when I told them, they were all inops facies – clueless faces, i.e.

Obedience for the leader is one of the defining roles of a good team. A pilot sits in the cockpit of a plane and sets direction for the plane. The plane does not decide its own direction. The plane obeys the pilot, and hence a smooth flight is achieved.

Given that the pilot is a right person and knows how to fly a plane, and that the plane follows his directions, they are destined to reach the destination together.

The farm unions and the farmers play the role of a pilot and a plane respectively. If farm unions and their leaders began paying heed to the tongue of every individual, there would be chaos and no strategic direction would be set. And if all individual protestors began to make their own decisions, there would be many but minuscule sparks instead of big, planned fireworks.

Singhu, it seemed, was already conversant with this model. I myself was fortunate to hear first-hand a real example of this.

On the second day of our visit, a big event followed: the Karnal cane charge. Farmers were allegedly beaten by armed policemen, and fatalities and injuries were reported. Despite this brutal attack, numbers and numbers of farmers kept sitting at the blocked toll plaza.

I eavesdropped on two farmers conversing with each other about this. An interesting detail I caught from this discussion was that the farmers were still there, the reason being that they had received no official statement asking them to leave the site, from farm leaders. They said they would get up only when some leader would tell them to do so, no matter the medium: Facebook, some messenger, some written order, or some appeal from a stage. Unless that came, they would continue the protest where they had been told to do.

This spirit of order and obedience is one of the key factors of the success of this agitation so far.

I remember waking up twice during the night. Though there were mosquitoes too, but I was feeling cold, thanks to the fans combined with the cooler combined with the cold weather that night. I was too lazy in my sleep to go and get something to cover myself with, and hence spent a part of the night shivering.

But apart from that, it was an easy night. I woke up next morning, fresh and satisfied, around 4.30 am. My other two companions were still sleeping, and I had woken up just like that, without an alarm. Sometimes your excitement is the alarm enough to get you up. Later I would learn that when the first alarm had gone off, one of us had turned off all the subsequent alarms.

Woken up alone in that big hall, I felt slightly weird. I could not make too much noise, lest I should disturb many sleeps, and so I decided to take a stroll and see if there were any toilets nearby.

Outside the hall-like massive tent, I found a different scene: I was not the first one to wake up on Singhu. People were going here and people were going there, some with towels on their arms, others with toothbrushes in their mouths, some of them talking quietly, others reciting their morning prayers. Some Hindu hymns were playing on the main stage – I recognised them as I had learned one in my primary school.

Two random old men passed by me – I stopped them and asked if they knew of any bathrooms nearby. They said they were already going that way, and I could accompany them.

Along a makeshift gurdwara, there was a little path heading towards a street parallel to the highway. There was a factory, sort of, which had been converted to a bathroom by installing a tall cuboidal box, and placing some tubs. A few men were taking bath in open.

After this memorable bathroom visit in that converted factory, I embarked again upon the highway and started heading not towards the hall-like tent but the other way. I wanted to have a glimpse of how Singhu functioned in a morning, from the waking up of man to waking up of the sun.

I reached till the KFC (where the first two incidents mentioned in this series took place), and took a return journey from there.

Another interesting thing ensued on this return journey. As I was on way, I spotted from some distance a hose supported into a massive tub to fill water in it. Water was filled to the brim, and had started spilling out. The man who had put up the hose had maybe forgotten about it. I wondered if I should do something to save water. I could spot, at least from there, no tap to which the hose was attached, or anything else that could stop the flow.

I was still wondering when a man passing by, just like me, stopped and stooped near that tub. He was a passerby, I was sure, as he seemed to be as confused as me, and was checking how he could turn off the flow of water.

I smiled ear to ear and learnt another secret of the success of this protest: care for a stranger as much as for an acquaintance.

There were three of us returning from a Langar (free community kitchen). Our afternoon meal had been delayed to around 5 pm, but now we were all satiated.

As the sun also began setting, coolness was presiding and it was altogether very pleasant. Shoulder to shoulder, we three walked through the thin crowd, heading towards the tent in which we had to stay for the night. Simultaneously we looked around at the other tents. People had started coming out, some were sitting outside their little huts and tents on chairs or manjas (charpoys).

On to our left was such a group of old men, perched on chairs and a charpoy, talking to each other and looking at the passersby. We were quite conspicuous due to our pant-shirts and that urban look you can’t avoid having easily. Those men called us and offered us to sit and talk. Kudos – that was why we were there, to talk and know more about the protest!

They told us to bring three chairs from inside of their hut, and we did that and then we were listening to them, and questioning them.

“How long have you been here?” was the first natural question.

“Nine months,” was the doubtless reply. “We need to visit our village and homes time to time, but then we are mostly here, at the protest.”

They were three people – one slightly less than the age my grandfather would have been, and two others at least twenty years elder to my father. Two of them had long, flowing milk-white beards.

Before long, a fourth old man appeared from behind the hut. He was introduced to us as a man who had never even once gone back home ever since the protest had started. “He has declared that he will either win or die, but not return home like this, ignored and defeated,” said one of them.

And this man’s face told a similar story too. He had the most wrinkles out of all of them. It had a different kind of gravity, some form of sadness but audacity. Sadness would be a wrong word – it was something different, some emotion that had no name.

One of us asked the main man, “What’s the secret of your undemolished spirits?”

There wasn’t one secret answer to this question: such things are a culmination of myriad factors. But an unrelated question fetched a nearby answer.

The question was, “How do you spend your free time?”

They replied, “Oh, we either do some sewa (voluntary service) at a langar, or we recite paath (religious recitation). At other times, we talk and discuss about new developments related to the protest.”

They – three old men, and we – three young boys – completely different from each other. But sooner or later, we would have to realize that they were on a lookout for us: old trees were in wait of seeds who would carry the gene forward, and keep the fruit alive.

As I was brushing my teeth, I took note of some interesting things, which gave me idea about how one could manage to stay on a road outside the protective walls of his house for nine months: minimalism.

To take a bath, a regular farmer needed only the bare-minimum items: a soap, some water, and clothes to change into, and that was it. If bucket and mug were not available, a man could bath by stooping under a tap or watering himself using a hose. A rope was all one needed to hang the wet clothes. Minimalism: that sounds quite like a modern term, but it is an essential part of the lives of these people who are not yet fully conversant to the dialing pad of an android phone!

Farmers' Protest taught me the’s the simplest take to life. As you are not obsessed with physical beauty, you do not require a mirror. An old man standing there, capturing everything with his eyes like me, waiting for his turn to bathe, randomly untied his turban from his head, used the wooden comb (kangha) tucked in his hair to comb them, and just like that, without needing anything, tied it again – all of this standing here, waiting subconsciously for his turn.

This lesson was really important. As aforementioned, I had come for one day but had decided to spend night here on a hunch. I didn’t have any pajamas to change into, nor a toothbrush, nor another set of clothes. The protest taught me to survive with all I had – and to be honest, it wasn’t even a tad difficult!

Minimalism is really fun, it makes life simple, but when it comes to you naturally, instinctively, it works wonders!

During my second morning at the Farmers’ protest site, I was there in a open ground near a KFC restaurant which had been transformed into a sort of massive public bathroom. Portable containers had been put up for use as toilets and urinals, and one particular nook was being used for bathing and washing purposes. At any given time during a regular morning, five to ten people were always taking bath at this place.

I needed a toothbrush. We had come to the protest thinking of a brief one-day visit, but the spirit of those who had been staying there since last nine months motivated us to stay at least one night there and witness a night at Singhu.

Therefore, I didn’t have any clothes to change, neither a toothbrush, nor toothpaste, nor a soap – nothing one might need were he to spend a night outside his home.

Someone suggested I should visit a langar and ask for either a toothpaste or daatan. A daatan is a plant product, usually a neem or kikkar, that one chews. Traditionally, when there were no toothpastes or brushes, people used daatans. Last year I got to meet a farmer, whose age was around 75, and his teeth were perhaps stronger than mine! He never used a Colgate. He just chewed a daatan every morning.

I visited the nearest langar. Early morning as it was, there was no one to be served anything, but a few sewadaars were preparing the first meal of the day. A man with a full black beard, towering height and glowing cheeks, was churning a ladle in a big utensil. Apart from him, an old man sat in a corner, skimming through the headlines of the day.

I asked him if he had daatan. He didn’t have any. It was then I noticed that I was in complete contrast to him. He was a pure rural, and I a born urban. His clothes and my clothes were metaphors of our opposite personalities. But we had a few things in common too: we were here for one purpose. And we both didn’t have a daatan.

Just when I was about to take a turn, he stopped me and said he did have toothpaste, and asked if it would do. I nodded my head and mumbled a “yes”. He paused his work and went behind the tent. During the two minutes he took there, I had a brief conversation with the old man reading newspaper. He queried about my place of residence, and what I wanted. The first man returned with a new toothpaste, and handed it to me.

As I took it from him, I told him that I would return the toothpaste in no more than two minutes.

His reply was in a perfectly natural tone, “No, no need to return. Use it and keep it there where you brush. It will help someone else.”

The reply astounded me, but I smiled and returned to my companions. They were amazed at how I had got a brand new pack of toothpaste for free. Since I didn’t have a brush, I applied some amount to my index finger and brushed my teeth.

The farmers’ protest hence taught me an important lesson about how an agitation could not be maintained without a spirit of commonwealth and sharing. Things were not to be hoarded and profited from, but to be used and passed on: and that’s exactly what I did with the toothpaste. I let it remain there on the wall near the taps. As I started walking away, I did notice some random baba ji picking it up and using it.

Glossary
Daatan – tooth-cleaning twig
Langar - a free communal kitchen
Sewadaars - voluntary workers
Baba ji – a respectful term for an old man

The clouds, the sun, the two I thought
Third a sky, knew I not.
Heat, and cold, two my choices,
Between, beyond, no other voices.
Above, below, two brief realms,
Idea a third, just overwhelms.
A spectrum but wide, the sky maintained,
Brain a binary's, ego was pained;
Looking out of the window, the sense I gained,
When the fog was swept, it rained and rained.