“No
society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of
the members are poor and miserable.”
- Adam
Smith
Okay lets see. Today was a fairly normal
day.
I was being the usual guy who sits in
front of the mapping designer all day dragging objects and coding this and
that. You know usual nerd IT stuff. Then this mail comes around lunch time from
a colleague. It seemed to be one of those forwards that you get in your
inbox from people who themselves got from somebody else, but it being of a huge
size (this one was 3MB) you forward it to everyone else you know an rid your
inbox of its burden soon after to avoid the out-of-space debacle.
The subject of this specific one was
"And we say that we are working hard!!!”
Well well, feeling a tad too sarcastic
today aren’t we.
So I opened it, and behold a big picture
of a dirty bony kid stood there staring back at me with soiled hands and booger
pouring out of his nose. Eww right?
I had figured out the topic of this mail
by now. This was going to be another mopey whiny one about malnutrition,
orphans or something. Don’t get me wrong I have nothing but love for them, but
heck looking at some of the relatives/family one ends up with sometimes makes
me feel envious of those buggers.
Anyways, I scroll down to next picture -
another shirtless kid (surprised?) with some sort of white dust all over him,
maybe concrete.
Unimpressed, I scroll down to the next
image - a greasy kid pushing some sort of lathe drill into metal and such
Aha now I see where this is going, lo and
behold the next image - a really dark girl smiling and holding a handful of
flowers to a car window at a traffic signal.
This was a mail about child labor. I keep
scrolling down with back to back images of kids not yet into their teens doing
minimum wage work like waiting on tables, cleaning dishes at a
restaurant, picking recyclable plastic garbage at the junkyard etc. There was
this one picture of a kid working at a construction site lifting like 5
concrete bricks, each almost as big as his limbs. That I found oddly
impressive.
Well jokes aside, the pictures were a sad
affair and I was especially moved by the one with the little kid picking
garbage in the huge almost-mountain of a landfill junkyard. I could only imagine the repulsive
odor and disgusting gunk in that place. That child definitely harped on the empathy
cord I sadly am born with.
But what actually got my brain churning to write this post here was the closing lines of the mail:
"Pls
dont be lazy to fwd this from ur Air conditioned cubicle sitting in a cozy
chair,
as u can see some r not gifted with a comfortable life as u are...
Let’s
join our Hands to stop Child labor in the every possible way we can!!
The
difference between perseverance and obstinacy is one often comes from a
strong will, and the other from a strong won't."
Self-righteous much, pal?
This guy here just called you an overpaid
pompous prick and an insensitive craphole and all in just two sentences. As if
he holds you personally responsible for letting this happen to the sweet
innocent homeless children of our great homeland.
And he by sending this mail to every
single guy he has in his contacts list has brought back order into this wicked
world.
Yeah right.
If only things were that easy, well then I
would already be sipping fresh orange juice in my 200 foot yacht just off the
port of French Riviera without having to work another minute in my life.
But life isn’t that easy, and solving
something as big and messy like child labor definitely isn’t. The guy who won
the Nobel Prize this year Kailash Satyarthi, an active anti-child labor
activist for about 30 years now was largely unknown in his own homeland before
this recognition came knocking his door.
How does that taste, stud? A guy works on
a clearly all-consuming campaign for nearly half his life and his own
countrymen do not know he exists until some group of people from the west
confers him with a title. Not much has changed in that department I guess,
nobody knew Ramanujan either till he was ‘discovered’ by a British math
teacher.
I am sure Mr. Satyarthi (his last name
totally suits for his work!) and his team would argue here that they have taken
care/bettered the life of, I assume, around 100,000 children all over
sub-continent. I no doubt admire that level of perseverance and zeal for
anything in a person. Kudos to that.
But if anyone here thinks forwarding a
mail with half-naked skinny kids doing manual labor they themselves have never
done in their own lives (I haven't!) absolves them of any responsibility of
doing something over this issue. Buddy, you are slimy grease ball and with
algae for brains. (Any better words I would so love to use for the likes of you
could hardly be posted up here publicly.)
If you really are concerned over any
social issue, or even a person for that matter. The worst thing you can do is
just shed more light on the issue and wash your hands off of it. Assuming your
part is done.
Real life is not an episode from Satyameva Jayate.
If you care for something, do something.
Something that's actually quantifiable and significant.
Want to make a change around yourself or
in somebody else's life? Do it.
Anything less than that. Please don't
bother. You are not doing anybody any favors.
*beep*
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Poor kids.Hard toiling in the heap of garage.
ReplyDeleteYes. It is truly a sad sight.
DeleteThanks for reading ):)