Walking a livelihood tightrope

Six-year-old Santoshibai was spotted on the busy thoroughfare of Waghbil doing a tightrope walk, an act of derring-do entertainment. A tightrope is a tightly stretched wire or rope fixed high above the ground on which someone walks across to entertain people, and it is the skill of maintaining balance while walking along a tensioned wire between two points. Santoshibai was walking on the tightrope and performing mind-boggling stunts by balancing earthen pots over her head. The awed onlookers kept clicking pictures, and Santoshibai’s mother got around collecting money from the onlookers. The young girl looked unperturbed by the nip in the air or the wonderstruck faces. She can’t afford to be distracted, and life for her family is like walking on a tightrope.

Santoshibai’s father, Chhotuban, belongs to the Nat community, a Dalit group known for their skilled trapeze artists. Now a resident of Panvel, he had left his village Bargaon in Chhattisgarh. Speaking to KYT, Chhotuban says, “Less than 30 artists still practice these trapeze skills in Bargaon, a village of around 3000 people.” According to him earlier, there was at least one Nat artist in each household. Today, nobody pays for this art in the village, so they migrate over 1,000 kilometers to Maharashtra every year.

Poverty is the most significant single force driving children into the workplace. Ideally, the six-year Santoshibai should have been in a classroom in a school. Still, abject poverty forced her to learn the skills of a trapeze artist. “We manage to earn Rs.1000 per day,” says her father, Chhotuban. It is alarming to see children so young rope walking when they ideally should be going to school and playing with toys.

There is much to learn from these trapeze artists. Maintaining a balance between two opposites is a great principle in real life. Life is a balancing act; we are always just a step away from a fall. Taking risks can change you fundamentally. No risk and no gains, and taking risks makes you braver, stronger, and more confident. We must move forward with our purpose to achieve our goals while balancing the various elements of our lives.

-Raghavendra Odeyar