The Purpose.

At first glance, the title and the photo would look to be totally irrelevant to the point where most people wouldn’t have even reached this part of the sentence which, you’re reading, possibly due to the trust that’s developed on my work. But now, let’s talk about this picture. Let’s talk about how this picture conveys a message which we all have known but have ignored for a very long time.

This isn’t just another street photograph. Look at it with a different perspective. Living in concrete jungles like Dubai, we’re forced to import everything- fruits, vegetables, rice, whatever it may be. They’re flown in, dumped in supermarkets, where we go, fill up a trolley and try to last for a week with that. That has an effect on both, the food and the consumer, both health-wise as well as psychologically.

Certain food items that’re imported needs to be flown in via air, which means they’re flooded with preservatives. And are tasteless. Honestly, the fruits and vegetables we get in Dubai are horrible in taste, and I know that because I’ve tasted real fruits and vegetables in Africa, where they’re actually grown freshly, without preservatives. This of course has a big effect on our health as I compared in my last post. But what’s really important is the psychological effect this whole process of filling a trolley in air conditioned supermarkets has on us. We’re in a way, pampered. We’re taught to just walk into one air conditioned place and expect to find whatever we need (Actually, most supermarkets are designed to make people buy stuff they don’t actually need. They tend to place those stuff which need to be sold as quickly as possible in the front side, and target the prime locations in the supermarkets to place things which are attractive but aren’t necessary) and walk out with all the stuff. This practice makes us lazy in a way. In a way, it’s been ingrained into our minds to look out for high profile supermarkets and grocery stores which portray a very decent profile on the outside. We don’t really care if the things over there are fresh, healthy or not. We just want to buy high profile things from high profile stores and not markets like the one in this picture because it’s seen by others as ‘civilised’ if it’s bought from high profile stores and ‘inferior’ if bought from markets like this. It’s also ‘seen’ to be superior and more decent if we use plastic bags provided by the vendor but indecent if we carry our own bags and use them instead.

I think that all this means that we’re just looking to do things in a way which is ‘regarded’ as decent by others, but we actually don’t care if it really serves the purpose. Your purpose of visiting a market or a store is to buy that item in a good condition, so why only focus on the expensive price tags? Its not like you never get good things for cheap. Your purpose of visiting a restaurant is just to eat good food. So why only focus on the big brands? There are a ton of restaurants that have really filling food for cheap. The money you spend on a burger that’s not filling at all, at McD could fetch you a full meal at a cafeteria, and turns out that the meal from he cafeteria is much more fresh and healthier than the fat filled burger that’s stuffed with cutlet which is days old and completely unhealthy.

So the whole point here is that, like the people in this picture, who look out for fresh food and lok to serve the purpose, we need to look towards doing things with a focus-oriented mind and not just think about how it may be perceived by others. It’s your task, and you need to do the task, not others. You need to get the result, not others. You need to work for it, not others.