A peek into an averted future

In a discussion that followed my last post on street children, my friend Arvind Benegal, who also works at Mindtree, asked me “Are there any studies that indicate what ultimately happens to the street children?” He sought to know how many of the children on the streets are able to make it to adulthood and what are their conditions as adults. 

The question indeed is very relevant, but I did not know of any studies that had happened on this very question, primarily because these studies would require collation of data over decades, before any conclusions could be drawn. But our observations would allow us to make some broad inferences about the street children who remain without any care - their health would properly deteriorate due to the lack of proper nutrition, absence of hygiene practices, accidents on roads and lack of shelter,  protection and health amenities, lack of education would mean they would not only remain unskilled for jobs but also shut from better possibilities; the psychological conditions probably would worsen due to their negligence and abuse; the child delinquencies would probably grow with the children into greater anti-social acts. With all of these considered, premature deaths are indeed quite a possibility. 

Street Children and Social Intervention

“But I don’t know why she left me” he wondered as he told us about himself, about his mother who deserted him and his family, about the home he decided to leave two years back, about the trains that took him to different places, about the police, he and his friends feared and about a middle-aged couple at Hubli who took him home for a few days before bringing him to the rehabilitation center for street children at Bangalore.

Raju (name changed) is one of more than two hundred and fifty children at six different shelter homes, across Bangalore, setup under the ‘Nele’ street children rehabilitation project. He is now eleven and is studying in his 6th grade in a Government school nearby. He told us that he is finding his studies interesting and has made many good friends. While he now sympathized with his mother, who he believes, only escaped the physical abuse of his alcoholic father, Raju was still not able to reconcile with the fact that his mother had left him behind.

Last Saturday, I had an opportunity of talking to many such children at Narendra Nele, one of the rehabilitation centers under the initiative. I was also part of a team that counseled the new entrants to the center. I could talk to a total of twenty children and in some cases also their parents. Through these conversations I tried to understand if and how social intervention can transform the lives of these children. The children included orphans, a few in number, some of whom had no memory of their families, some vaguely remembered the places where they were born. Some had families that they had fled and some others were single parent children whose fathers had died or had abandoned their mothers.

When the darlings failed

Do the “young MPs” represent the young India or a neo-feudal order in India?

A few days back a magazine carried an article titled ‘Young MP myth busted’. It asked “Are Kanimozhi and Supriya Sule no longer members of that darling group? “. But as more skeletons tumble from the cupboards of another “young MP” Dayanidhi Maran, as we hear stories of how this heir of another political dynasty made more money than the infamous A Raja and could stoop to more abominable and crude ways of swindling money (Read this), it could get nightmarish for those who naively or otherwise ever believed in that idea of a set of foreign educated, “progressive” young MPs from political dynasties parachuting down and rendering salvation to the hapless and helpless Indian people.

Coming as they did from the political families, the “young MPs” were born with a privilege nobody else could ever dream of. They were born rich and powerful and was just a matter of time before they could fit themselves into the shoes that were kept polishing all the while they completed their courses in Cambridge and Oxford. The financial empires built by and for the political empires of the families were also their inheritance from the day one. The media too loved them, the fluent English that they spoke and the late night parties that they attended together.  The awards like ‘The politician of the year’ and “Indian of the year’ could also come in advance – the merit it deserved and the work it needed could all come later if it ever could. These princes of the various dynasties had every thing set for a great leap into future.

Just that they faltered. Did they? Or were they undeservingly hyped in the first place? 

The ‘shared destiny’ of Manmohan Singh

Why every Prime Minister craves to leave behind a legacy at the cost of India’s strategic interests

The Wikileaks has it that when the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh talked about a ‘shared destiny’ with Pakistan, his relatively pragmatic National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan jovially told him “you have a shared destiny; we don't.”

Such romantic rhetoric would have been a spectacular if not an exasperating joke, if it were to be made by any leader of say the White House. But ‘strategy’ seems to be something alien or less endowed to the leaders of India who are always so keen to substitute it with such confused blurt.

.....and the men in the Nazi uniform

Book review of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne

'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ is a wonderfully told story. In the foreground runs a thread of an enduring friendship between two innocent boys, one, a son of a Nazi commandant and other a Jewish prisoner. In the background is the context of the Nazi holocaust. It is the intersection of these two that makes this story both captivating yet devastating. In that it has a strange parallel in Khaled Hosseini's 'Kite Runner'.

Bruno, the son of the Nazi Commandant is innocent enough to be oblivious of the greater designs that his people have for the people on the other side of the fence - all of whom strangely wear striped pyjamas . There is a subtle originality to this nine year old that sometimes would seem a perfect recipe for dissent against the overwhelming Nazi setup, but for his innocence. Or is it because of it?

Making tribals shareholders in the mining companies

There is a novel suggestion in the new Mines and Minerals (Development & Regulation) Bill, 2010 which is being discussed by GOM headed by Pranab Mukherjee. The bill proposes that 26% of the profits of the mining companies should now be shared for the development of the tribals and other displaced people of that area.

BK Handique, the former Union Minister for Mining in whose tenure the bill was given shape told a newspaper “We need to bear in mind that the economic rent from a natural resource is a surplus that arises from the intrinsic qualities of the resource and is not just a product of sweat and capital of the entrepreneur” Wow! what a refreshing perspective especially when other Union Ministers are busy selling precious natural resources from petroleum to spectrum in return for bribes or petty personal favors. For the first time somebody seems to be speaking sense.

Why India is not a 'Melting Pot' or a 'Salad Bowl'

Continued from The Invisible Idea called India

In my last blog post, we had discussed how “intellectuals” moulded in Western experience found it difficult to reconcile with the idea of India. Here I find it apt to quote what the great Indian thinker Rabindranath Tagore had to say on this, something I missed in my last post.

The Nobel Laureate in his very vocal indictment of the Euro-Centric view of history, wrote that the “superstition that history has to be similar in all countries must be abandoned.” In his unmatched poetic style he called these scholars the “people who look for aubergine in paddy fields” (aubergine is a hairy upright herb also called as egg-plant). He added “and when they do not find it, in their frustration they refuse to count paddy as a variety of grains at all." This criticism came more than a century ago. But the obsession with 'looking for aubergine in paddy fields' has continued and many still “refuse to count” India as a nation, as we have seen in the last post.

In this post let us see how this ‘look for aubergine in paddy fields’ manifests in the social and political approaches towards India, by taking up the case of two very popular metaphors used to discuss Indian society. We specifically discuss how the two concepts represented by the metaphors,  the ‘Melting Pot’ and the ‘Salad Bowl’ which have been borrowed from the West and indiscriminately applied to the Indian context have lead to both simplistic and faulty understanding of India.