Children of circumstance..

Talking to a friend about how a girl working in their house in Kolkata gave her a little drawing because she wanted to. Reading about the little children who had their hair snipped to separate them from the others as they were admitted to a Bangalore school under the Right To Education quota via another friend's posts. And then remembering and rushing to find a bit of graffiti with my name made fo

r me when I was at the Magill detention centre. These are not the sort of child that has had much of a childhood. Parents and often society has given up on them. They come to the centre from court and are watched by hawk-like attention by the men working there. They eat their food with metal cutlery that is counted when issued and re counted when the dishes are done. They sit in rooms with glassed walls at all times and are guarded 24 hours. Even games turn into violence as I saw on a few occasions.

The boys and girls are very rarely able to escape this cycle of institutionalising. They will mostly end up in adult prisons. That is a sad but true side of the story. When their terms are over, they return to the same environments that they came from. Very few are strong enough to change. Even fewer are allowed that chance. A week after I was there, a group of boys stabbed another with a sharpened spoon. I knew all four by name.

And yet in the middle of that, a 16 year old comes up and tells me how much he misses his son who is only 5 months old, and a 12 year old comes to me, asks me my name and does a graffiti of it in coloured inks.

Everyone, but everyone, knows and responds to love.