Taare Zameen Par ?

Why am I writing this disheartening piece? I really don’t know. The bitter truth about the abuse of innocent children assails us every day but nothing seems to change. As a parent and also as an ordinary citizen worried about the falling quality of life in every sphere, this topic has been troubling me for long. So, it is an effort to scribble something about this national disgrace, a kind of catharsis. Even if a few of us try in our own little ways to mitigate the misery of the luckless souls, what could be better than that?

In India, one child goes missing every eight minutes. This translates into 65,700 disappeared children in one year. So says the National Crime Records Bureau. Forty percent of them never get to see their parents again. This is a chilling statistic which unfortunately gets buried under the din over secularism, GDP, sliding rupee and growth rate. The children are kidnapped for human trafficking, begging, as domestic slaves, bonded labourers in factories, prostitution and child porn racket. Many are mutilated before being forced into begging to evoke sympathy. This is horrifying, shameful and extremely disconcerting.

The response of the police (after granting the requisite latitude for all the handicaps faced by the force) and our society towards this shocking chronicle is typical. We remember the horror of Nithari but initially when the slum-dwelling parents went to the police to lodge complaints about their missing children, they were shooed away. In sharp contrast, when the Adobe India CEO’s son was kidnapped for ransom, senior police officers paid visit to the house of the CEO and everything was done to ensure that the boy was released unharmed.

Why millions of children are suffering this fate when they should be actually enjoying their precious childhood, playing with toys, attending schools? Is the administration doing anything to provide some semblance of dignity and happiness to these poor kids? Or rather, is it nigh impossible in a stable democracy like ours to plan and execute dedicated welfare schemes targeting such children? How many tiny tots we see on a daily basis, begging, rolling in mud and filth near construction sites, on the roads, train stations and footpaths? God forbid, but let us replace, only for a moment, the face of a child begging on the street in Delhi with that of our loved one. Does not a shiver  run down our spine?

   In ‘Brothers Karamazov’ by Fyoder Dostovsky, there is an interesting discussion between the brothers Ivan and Aloysha on God. Ivan cannot reconcile the existence of a loving and all-compassionate god with that of the ineffable suffering of blameless children. He questions Aloysha, ever the believer, about incidences wherein parents themselves punish their children cruelly, and the crimeless little souls are terrified, confused and shattered. Many of you might have read about a father and stepmother assaulting and maiming their five year old son last week in Kerala. I am not philosophically inclined, but even then, the logic of karma seems absurd here.  

While I was posted briefly in Nagaland in the year 2004, I regularly used to travel via Kolkata and Guwahati by train. I would be disturbed by the sight of young street urchins at railway platforms, sniffing at a piece of cloth in their fists, dipped in some stimulant, having nasty physical fights with each other. They were foul-mouthed and violent-pelting stones and crushing bandicoots near the train tracks. Almost every one of them had one open wound or a leaking abscess on his little body. What circumstances might have placed these young ones in such a pathetic situation, I used to wonder. Later, when I was working in Durg district of Chhattisgarh, I was privileged to be associated with a program which aimed at educating the homeless, street children in special, boarding schools. One lady from the town used to voluntarily visit the kids every evening, teaching them alphabets and telling stories. I was moved by the response of these juveniles when they were shown love. Till then, perhaps throughout their childhood, what they had experienced was only scorn, abuse and hardships. When they were treated with tender words and kindness and when they realized that are some people who care for them too, their reciprocation was touching.

The plight of children is the same in most of the poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. It is possibly much worse in the war-ravaged zones. Perhaps, as the great man Buddha once said, life is nothing but suffering. The world is of course not perfect but what makes this fact more poignant is the misery of the little angels of God.