You can find him by evening outside the busy Jayanagar Shopping Complex – the peripatetic lotterywala. He moves about the place on a bicycle and employs all the tricks of the trade to entice wary buyers. He has an uncanny knack for rousing all the latent cupidity and greed even in the most parsimonious for who does not yearn to become a “crorepati” without having to work for it?

Believe it or not, the lotterywala is a retired Indian Army officer. Kishen Lal had seen many a battle in his life, but the biggest battle of them all was when he was invalidated out of the Army on medical grounds. As a retired  major, he found his pension inadequate and had to find a supplementary source of income to support himself and his family. So he took up the agency for lotteries of various states.

The more staid among his former colleagues were scandalised and rather wanted him to try for a middle-level management slot in a public sector outfit, perhaps as a security officer, but Kishen Lal remained placid. For him there was such a thing as the dignity of labour and moreover, there was nothing “infra dig”in selling lottery tickets if it enabled him to earn his living by the honest sweat of his brow.

Kishen Lal is a true blooded Punjabi whose family came down south after it was displaced during the partition; Punjabis have a justifiable reputation for being hardy and self-reliant with a strong sense of dignity of labour.
Comparisons are odious and often presumptuous, but the fact remains that for a daring spirit of enterprise, a Punjabi stands apart and for the adventurous spirit of making a living, a Keralite stands supreme. We can find “chai” shop even in remote Badrinath run by Keralites.

Recently, I ran into a long-lost friend who told me of his futile quest for a white-collar government job. “Why don’t you start a road-side stall selling sugarcane juice?” and he looked at me as though I had pole-axed him and walked away in dignified silence.

Yes, there is indeed a false sense of dignity, and pride.