Who Are these Children?

Dear Citizens,
Have you ever heard this vedantha? Yesterday is dead, Tomorrow is yet to be born, Why worry about the bitter experiences of dead yesterday? Why worry about unborn tomorrow? It is enough if today passes pleasantly, because it is like an expensive gift to be relished.

With this lifestyle, a burning belly, un-kept hair, sunken eyes, dry skin, unwashed body, the living spaces are trains, railway platforms and streets, fighting for leftovers at the dustbins, inflicting bleeding wounds on themselves, stretching their dirty palms, hoping to gain some sympathy of the people who might give them alms. Every hour and every minute is uncertain, just like the uncertainty of the next meal….

Where should they go? how should they journey? how far should they travel? with no consciousness of their paths or the time of the day or night, facing the burning sun, rains lashing out, shivering in the cold, with no clothes to keep them warm or any sense of the month, week or day, they need to survive, the children eking out a living on the streets and platforms are forced to find ways and means for their very survival. To many of us, this might seem criminal, yet what other choices do the children have?

The money that is earned through begging or rag-picking, is immediately spent on cheap liquor, cigarettes, beedis, films, tobacco, as they have no other options to save the money. This also poses the danger of the children being continuously intoxicated with drugs and liquor.  More than all this, they are prey to sexual assault and abuse, which over  a period of time, the children learn to tolerate/ become numb to such abuse and more often than not use the same weapon to inflict abuse on others.  Being left to themselves, they rarely have anyone to care for them when they sick, ill or hurt.  There is no one they can turn to in their times of despair, during their most vulnerable depressed states. 

They are also easy prey to adults, who will use and exploit them for their own selfish ends.  All of this makes the children averse to the society that constantly thwarts them, shuns them and keeps them on the periphery of the safe havens that the so-called society has created for them. This is exactly, what the anti-social elements wait for, preying on these children when they are at their lowest, abusing them and keeping these children as their slaves. 

These children have lost the warmth of their mother’s lap and the love of being fed by her and so has forgotten how to extend any love, their plight forces them to fend for themselves by stretching their hands for alms. These are the children that the society wants to forget about, yet what we need to remember is that these are the citizens of our country today…. who will be making or breaking India’s destiny.  Ignorant of these children’s actual plight, the society chooses to label them as thieves and criminals.

All of these children are on the streets, for no fault of theirs – they come from broken homes, born to single parents of those who fathers have most often deserted the family, children of prisoners, from families who have been affected by HIV/AIDS, the lopsided systems of education, stressing and pressuring children to be part of the schools promoting English as the only way forward.  The effects of the media, peer pressure and promotions by advertisements of the life that can be had, further pushes children and families into vulnerable situations, making each person selfish and self centred.  These promotions pile false hopes and push children to explore reel life in real life.  Begging has become one of the most lucrative businesses across our society; this means of earning money has babies and children being stolen, kidnapped, hired and maimed to garner sympathy for alms from public. Children are huddled into groups and taught to lie to survive, while living in constant fear of being harmed, beaten and hurt by the begging mafia.