Half a cup of tea

Recently in my town, the municipality was digging up roads everywhere in order to 'improvise'' the sewage system. No society, colony or alley was spared. All of a sudden you find outside your house a digger, some under-paid workers, lots of pipes and some well-dressed guys calling themselves engineers from a 'reputed' firm, which had the contract of the sewage improvisation plan. And before you know, the digger is digging away, rather ruining the road right in front of your house. Neither your car nor your bike can come out of your house.

So like just a few days back it was our turn to be under a house arrest (our vehicles were stuck inside our compound!) We had seen that wherever this digger team went, they broke water pipelines and telephone cables. So we were hoping none of this happened to us. But alas! it did. The digger guy broke our pipe-line too. They spared our telephone cable (thank goodness!) This happened in the morning. We sat thinking that we would be without water for a week.

That evening itself, men from this team came to repair the broken line. There was an engineer and about three labourers. After a bit of digging about, they managed to find out which pipe brought water to our house. 

The 'Water-team' got to work. Pulled out old pipes, put in new ones. A bit of our wall was broken too in that pretext. But work was done. Woooo. Then we gave all the labourers present each half  a cup of extremely sweet tea. 

This small amount of tea changed their attitude completely. First of all a smile came on all their faces. One of the workers had a little kid too. The little guy was sitting there playing in the mud, immersed in his own world. His mother gave him a bit of the hot sweet beverage. His face literally brightened up. The way the little fellow sat down, enjoying each sip of the hot tea..it changed my mood. I was pretty tired correcting a hundred test-books myself. This did lighten my mood. 

The tea however refreshed the repair team's attitude. They applied a bit of concrete and repaired the bit of wall they had broken. They took measures to make sure the  the new pipe-line remained secure from 'external forces'. The 'Tea-charged' engineer even gave us spare pipes and joints to use in case of a pipe emergency, you know, in case we needed a pipe to fight zombies if apocalypse took place. 

Anyways, this did make me realize that sometimes, you do not need a bribe to get your stuff done. A little smile, a bit of kindness, a small conversation, small talk, or just half a cup of tea ,might work just fine..