Braving our failures

Only when I became a mother did I start to understand some things about children. It was as if I had been blind for the longest time, but now these things were raised in braille and they pricked my fingertips urgently with meaning and import.

Only when I became a mother did I start to understand some things about children. It was as if I had been blind for the longest time, but now these things were raised in braille and they pricked my fingertips urgently with meaning and import. For the first time, I understood how hunger can grow from an abject hollowness in your stomach, balloon until it became a relentless weeping and wailing, gnaw at its own distended seams, and then burst, leaving behind that hopeless, vacant look you see on Ethiopian infants on newsreel.

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Photographs of Somalian children, little Palestinian refugees, Afghan boy soldiers and Kashmiri orphans rushed into a quick rewind of the tragic events that had thrown these young ones into their particular stillness. For the first time, my plain admiration for the children who won the annual national bravery awards turned into plain horror.

Here are our brave children. Two of them chased militants after they killed their schoolteacher and, despite being threatened by guns, caught one of them. Another two stood up against child marriage. A boy saved a girl from a tiger. A nine-year-old saved a child from being drowned. And this is only part of this year’s list. Mines, bombs, guns. Charging cows, gaping wells, crashing bridges. Kidnappers, terrorists, cruel employers. There’s no challenge we spare our children, no danger we consider too menacing for them.

For one such challenge they may get an award for overcoming, we have been spinning out a hundred humdrum others, to test them at every step. Poverty — beat that, we say. Child labour — deal with it. No water? Too bad. Grapple, struggle, be brave.

There’s a UN Convention on Rights of the Child, with dreamy ideas like Right to Play. But the reality is unlovely. We are closer to implanting 32 perfect cosmetic teeth on the face of the moon than to giving children the first right they deserve — a childhood.

We could do with a resounding kick to our butt. We suck at everything — government, politics, religion, social justice, crime control, rural and urban planning, even traffic management — but most of all, we suck at being empowered adults. Things may be changing, but the children are fighting the same odds.

Nearly 20 years ago I interviewed Oinam, a diminutive girl from Manipur, winner of a National Bravery Award. All of six, she had saved three friends from drowning, two of them four years old, the other nine and ‘very fat’, she said. They had been crossing a rickety bamboo bridge on their way to play with dolls.

The bridge collapsed; Oinam managed to get to the other side. Then she hauled up her friends one by one with the help of a bamboo pole. She was dismissive about having saved her friends, but rued that she couldn’t save her dolls. “My dolls were all drowned,” she told me, her eyes shimmering, “and I wept for my beloved dolls...”