Where There is a Wheel

Where There is a Will by P.Sainath highlights how there is a huge revolution that very easily happens in Pudukkottai, a small District in Tamil Nadu.  

It is a very rare & unique opportunity when women, especially not very literate become the cause of change.

In Pudukkottai women started learning bicycling as a means of freedom.  This carried out to be chain reaction when women felt that trying to make people around them also enjoy independence was the reason why women were taught cycling free of cost and voluntarily.   Women who had learned cycling and had the ability to train the others were called master trainers and they would try to train the others.  Fortunately, all those women who joined the literate movement were diverted towards the new cyclist movement thereby, twin advantages were in their favor.  Women who joined the neo-cyclist movement were drawn towards the neo-literate movement which meant that people, especially women were able to gain a lot of freedom and also oppose the male domination.  

There were occasions when women used cycles for multitasking, i.e, especially so when women tried to purchase gents cycle and they used the front carrier to seat children, first their produce on the carrier and hang pots of water behind.  Doing so, they were able to:

1. Reduce their dependency on public transport.
2. Sell more goods
3. Take care of their children
4. Save time and money for their comfort.

Initially, when this movement started, there were many men who opposed it, it was then that the Arivoli Iyakkam movement (light of knowledge) began and many volunteers of this movement would attack men and warn them when they made nasty remarks.  Added to this, the movement had one volunteer called Muthu Bhaskaran who had written an anthem song that was sung by these and this further united their struggle.

DC Sheela Rani Chunkath moved the banks to provide loans for all those women who wanted to purchase bicycles.  This further strengthened the women and instilled a lot of confidence in them.  One of them tries to describe the journey on her bicycle equivalent to a plane journey because they were never exposed to any technological development.

The narrator P.Sainath who returns to Pudukkottai after some time realizes how that revolution and the same attitude still existed in Pudukkottai and the same description is seen in the postscript written by him.