Your Children, Our Children

India-the country of hopes as many would call it-often sees the death of it. A very silent death. This demise of hope is all pervasive. Extend your necks and fix your gaze and witness this ominous play of misery and anguish under the great concrete arch of flyovers, on rocky beds, or even the brown grounds of green parks. Normally, children glimmer with hope and laughter but the children residing (quite, nomadically) in the aforesaid locations are very taciturn. They are silent watchers as if they are watching torment personifying right in front of their eyes. Like a wild animal would go on to move and twirl itself around and pop its eyes out to check for predators, these children, too, lend their sight to the world. A world that they cannot call their own nor is the world willing to claim these little creatures. Who knows which skies have they fallen from? And so in the climax of this play, are closed the doors of education right in the faces of these little “aliens”. This is the very death of hope. When you kill hope, you kill children and when you kill children, you kill the very essence of civilization. 

                            How, then, can this dying civilization be saved? Intellectuals like Tagore firmly opposed the centralisation of education to the elite and the privileged and advocated for a more holistic approach. Holistic enough to be able to educate the downtrodden. Yet, this dream remains unfulfilled. When we complain of rampant poverty and dirty sewers and hungry beggars, we often forget that these are just symptoms of a more dire problem. When oppression rises, education falls. Hence, the latter has to be put in place for conditions to improve. The role of the writer is not always to give solutions to problems but to point them out to the deaf and blind for them to see and think. So, the question of how exactly the issue of undereducation be solved is not presently answerable due to the limited horizons of my thinking capacity. However, I know that apathy is the antithesis of “good” and that it is not necessarily “evil”. The question of the pen and paper ought to be the burning concerns of today. Without them, no stomachs of the hungry and poor could be filled for their appetite extends beyond materialistic needs. When we dream of a prosperous nation, we must realise that it may only be a pipe dream until the tool of literacy is delivered to all the sections of society. Ambedkar, long ago, gave a slogan, “Educate. Agitate. Organise”. This, he believed, was a chronological call towards social reform. But, unfortunately, with education itself being a distant place to conquer, we must first agitate and organise and ask for this very fundamental right, especially, for the upliftment of the marginalised.

                           How long will little hands smell of oil and leather and be stained of grease? How long until it finally rains and is washed all of it? Afterall, the sun, too, must be waiting to dawn upon and galvanise a new era of hope. Hope which is finally realised in fluid ink and inked pages. 

-Vanshika