Article Source : Mid Day, Mumbai

Author : Suketu Mehta

Date of Issue : Jun 12 200

Title of Article : Maximum Children

Details : Author Suketu Mehta has set up a legal defense fund for Indian street kids. He announced this at a CRY convention in New York yesterday. Excerpts from his speech.

By now most of us in America are familiar with the happy news, of which we can all be proud: In this year’s spelling bee, all four of the top finalists were of desi background. We might be forgiven for thinking that our children are the smartest in the world. Bill Gates ne bhi bola. The Microsoft founder went to India in said that Indians were the second smartest people in the world, after the Chinese. The Indians were almost as happy about this as the Chinese. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times says much the same thing: India will be the twenty-first century’s superpower. Americans will be lining up outside the Indian Embassy for work visas and their kids will have to learn Hindi.

The same day that Anurag Kashyap won the spelling bee, two hundred million of his brothers and sisters in India went to bed hungry. That same day, one hundred million of them worked for up to 15 hours, in hellish carpet workshops, in teastalls, in construction sites, instead of going to school. That same day, two million of them, younger than 15, sold their bodies to men for money.

I saw a lot of sadness when I went back to Bombay with my family a few years ago to live there. I watched people getting tortured in police stations. I heard other people describe how they set their neighbors on fire for the simple crime of being Muslim. I saw the systematic deterioration of a city that I love like no other. But you know what was the saddest sight in Bombay? Seeing kids on the street, taught to beg before they were taught to walk. It broke my goddamn heart.

One Bombay morning, walking on the road leading to the Strand bookstore, I saw a little family: A mother, with wild and ragged hair, walking with a baby boy, maybe a year old, fast asleep on her shoulder, leading by the hand another boy, maybe four or five, the boy rubbing his eyes with the fist of his free hand. He was walking the way children walk when they have been walking a long time; his legs jerking outward, his head nodding in a circle, to beat the monotony, to beat the tiredness. They were all barefoot. They might have been walking like this for hours. The mother said something gentle to the older boy, still clutching fast to her hand. I had walked past them, but then I had to stop. They came up to a stall, and, as I expected, the mother held out her hand. The stall owner did nothing, didn’t acknowledge them. Automatically I found myself opening my wallet. I looked for a ten, then took out a fifty instead, and walked up very fast up to them, my insides raging, and thrust the fifty in her hand, “Yes, take this,” and walked on without looking back, till I got to the air-conditioned bookstore and then stood in a corner and shut my eyes.

The identification with my own family was so strong - I have two young sons too - that I started constructing a past and a future for them. Probably they would have walked like that all day long, all barefoot in the heat. A hundred times a day the boys would have seen their mother hold out her hand to beg. A hundred people would be watched by the clear eyes of the boys as they cursed their mother, told her to move on, or threw some change at her. And still she would carry them on her shoulder when they were tired. Sometimes she might put them down in the dirt and then they would eat a little rice or sleep where they were from tiredness.

In cities like Bombay, we train ourselves not to see. The visual pollution has tinted our lenses, and we can block out strong stimuli like the mother and her children. A polarized lens that blocks out the visually displeasing: mother with baby begging, cripples on the side of the road, an old woman dying quietly in the train station. We can ask our police to keep law and order and would prefer not to see their methods, what they do to the poor to keep them quiet. The good and great of the city, if you will ask them if they would like to take a walk around the slums or the police stations, will give you Bartleby’s answer: “I would prefer not to.”

I got home that evening and was more tired than I’d ever been in Bombay. The previous evening I had come home from a small party of billionaires, people richer than I’d ever met in New York. The discordance had got to me now. But my direction had been made suddenly very clear: I wanted to find the one thing that will help that one mother on the road get her kids off the footpath. I do not want her to have to beg. I want the little one to sleep on a clean mattress in a clean room. I want the older one to be able to realize the possibilities of his mind, to dream and to hope.

India is no longer a poor country; there’s enough in the treasury to feed everyone. But all our progress - all our computer and jewelry billionaires, our spelling bee champions, our award-winning writers and Bollywood stars - they all mean nothing if we have malnutrition rates among our children that surpass those of Sub-Saharan Africa, and if one in six girls in India doesn’t live to see her 15th. birthday. We are the richest single ethnic community in North America, but all our wealth is shallow and worthless if we can’t even take care of our children back home. We complain loudly when there are negative portrayals of India in the western media. We object to pictures of starving babies; and it is true, we’ve come a long way in abolishing the catastrophic famines of the 1950’s. But we’re not there yet, not by a long way. Go out on the streets of any major Indian city, and watch the children suffer. Go to Kamathipura and see ten year old girls on sale to eighty year old men. Go to the workshops making carpets, beedis, and fireworks and see six year old girls, with their bright eyes and nimble fingers working fourteen hours a day instead of accumulating the knowledge they’ll need to lift themselves out of bonded slavery. Economic superpower indeed. The only thing worse than not being able to feed our children is having the capacity to do so, and still not doing it.

The omnibus legislation that defines the government’s responsibility to India’s children is the Juvenile Justice Act of 2000. India is also a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Under this treaty, the government of India is legally obligated to guarantee all its children four basic rights:

* the right to survival - to life, health, nutrition, name and nationality
* the right to development - to education, care, leisure, recreation
* the right to protection - from exploitation, abuse, neglect
* the right to participation - to expression, information, thought and religion

Children’s issues have to be seen as human rights issues, not charity issues. It’s not from our munificence that we award children these basics. In the end, we are not philanthropists when we give food to a hungry child on the street. We are acting selfishly; we are making an investment. In our future, in the future of the human race. 40% of the country is below the age of 18. That’s four hundred million children, the largest population of children in any country in the world. It is a post-independence generation, that expects something better than their parents. If they won’t get it, they will be angry. And no family, no country, can withstand the anger of its young. There will be an explosion.

That explosion could come from the AIDS orphans. By the year 2010, there will be an estima