The Lost Childhood
Searching for Hope
Where is my joy?
This is for those whose eyes are shut; ears stuffed with selfishness and are dumb to the ever changing social atmosphere. A small child laborer speaks for himself -------
“Why should I speak? No one cares for us.
Babuji, this world is manifestation of individuals with deep loathing for street and lane encroachment platoon. They think we are an army of parasitic blood, sucking the nation’s economical frontier. We are poor, have no home, eat a single meal---------that’s why we are criminals. The crime is we are born in such a society where the benefactor is material. Our dream is folly for those minarets of prosperity. A single morsel is mountain for each and every boys and girls in our community. We scale such peaks daily but are never reported. The media does the noble job of bringing our photos out in the newspaper with caption ‘The social pollutants litter the streets and the government does nothing to remove them’. We don’t know who cares for us. Our plight is unheeded. Our tears are not wiped. Our wishes are not accounted for. Schooling is meant for boys with big houses. We are considered social burden. Oh! Sorry worse than them. The animals after birth have the opportunity to search for food but we are cursed not to have that noble opportunity. We the humans of streets look for job at the age of three only, to have one meal. The cakes of our labor are taken by our lords who boast feeding us. The government penalizes them (people who offer us jobs for food they offer us) for keeping child laborers and the moment they throw us away we are left unemployed. After some days we starve and wait for death to free us. Freedom is right of every human. The death will surely reduce the number of child laborers and the administration can brag about the reduction in number of parasite children because no data is available for people dying of hunger. Long live your social revolution”.
- The smiles and brightness of dreaming eyes become dull in daily work schedule.
- A chirping small girl is subjected to the whip of child labor only to become silent and morose.
- A ten years boy pulls rickshaw with a man of fifty who is unconscious of the crime he is committing.
The hands which need pens get hammers and shovels, the eyes which long for toys get handicraft tools to dim them.
Oh! The nation is marching towards increasing GDP, NDP and of course power grabbing path but no one knows that the mighty body of India has cavity inside. The loop is becoming vicious and caring for downtrodden and underprivileged is crime. The rubbles are these children’s toys, the shovels their cricket bat the hammer blow their cricket shot and brick laying their field strategy. Their hunger is practice session and starvation is reward for taking birth. What should we say “Long live equality or long live child labor”.
