Osmosis IRL

Osmosis

Osmosis is term all of us come across during our schooling days.

In biology, osmosis is the movement of water molecules from a solution with a high concentration of water molecules to a solution with a lower concentration of water molecules, through a cell’s partially permeable membrane.

Water purification through reverse osmosis is one of the popular application in our day to day life.

Do we see anything similar to Osmosis in real life?

Osmosis IRL is Migration

How can we say Osmosis = Migration, especially the interstate migration within a country.

Lets use an anology.

Osmosis is the movement of water molecules working class from a solution region with a high concentration of water molecules population to a solution region with a lower concentration of water molecules population, through a cell’s partially permeable membrane cultural/language barrier.

Lets read the corrected statement.

Osmosis is the movement of working class from a region with a high population to a region with a lower population, through a cultural/language barrier.

Correcting few details,

• region with a high population → region with high supply of workers
• region with a lower population → region with high demand for workers
• cultural/language barrier → The landscape of the country and people culture changes with every few 100 Kms. So, the cultural difference between the two is inevitable.

Travel vs. Migration

When we talk about migration, we shouldn’t confuse it with travelling.

Travelling is visiting a place away from home and returning back home. While migration involves moving away from home for work. Travel gives you pleasure. Migration is intended to work.

Difficulties involved

No matter the home is thatched hut or royal castle, our home is where we are comfortable with. Migration involves leaving back all the comfort and moving into some new place, but what could be the incentive to come out of one’s comfort zone?

• Student migrating to foriegn land has incentive to learn, get better job. He is backed by student-tag, most of the mistakes are accepted, and might be backed by parents' money.
• Working professional moving into foreign place has a backing of his salary. The salary provides a cushion for soft landing on to an unknown place.
• Blue collared workers are the most affected ones. They don’t have rich and affluent parents/family to support them. Nor do they have huge salary to protect them.

The BCW are the ones going through some of the worst of both worlds - staying away from family and surviving a new culture, new people and carrying expectations of the dear-ones staying some 100s of kms away.

Why people are migrating?

Money. ₹₹.

I don’t want to go into the political, cultural differneces betweeen Notherern and Southern states. But we all can agree that North has densely populated, poor states and South has sparsely(subjectively speaking) populated, rich states.

Also, the lower population leads to lower working population in Southern states. Naturally, the young working class migrates to the Southern states to fill the void, and earning back money.

How to accept them?

It’s counterintuitive, but to understand the pain a migrant goes through, we too should experience it.

• How hard will it be to leave back friends and family?
• How hard it is to leave one’s comfort zone?
• How hard it is going to make friends in the adult life?
• How hard will it be to explain your young ones the reason to move away from his play area?

Everyone of us should leave our homeland and venture out to see how it is outside. There is nothing to be proud of one’s home. Stay out for few years, understand the pain felt by a fellow man.

Once we experience the hunger, the pain, the exploitation, we won’t indulge in the same. And accept people who they’re without tags like ‘migrant’, ‘foreigner’ or etc.

It’s just a natural cycle

via GIPHY

Like many other things, migration too is cyclical. Once the demand tilts the reverse migration is always possible, resulting in role-reversal.

Sometime in the future our descendants may end up as migrating to somewhere else. Acceptance of fellow humans without any religious/cultural/geographical tags is the way forward.