MAHI IS DEAD

‘Mahi is dead’, was the one liner which one of the leading news channels gave soon after the hapless child was pulled out of the bore well in which she had fallen into 84 hours before. Not the first child to fall in and not the first to die. Ever since, the widely televised rescue operation of ‘Prince’ was covered live, many more have fallen in, only to come out dead.

The public is exhausted of the nail biting suspense of watching and hearing of such agonizingly long operations and their subsequent failures. They are tired of grieving and they are tired of helplessly wringing their hands as by-standers. Like one of them, I too had tried to block my mind by switching off the TV, only to toss and turn all night and getting up in the wee hours of the morning to once again switch on the idiot box in the wane hope of hearing a happy ending. But, it has almost always been sad news.

But more than grief, now it is outrage and anger; anger at the abuse and callousness that we as a nation and as adults show to our children, especially poor children.

Is there never to be any accountability? And what is this entire hullabaloo about havans and yajnas being performed all over the country by a generally apathetic citizenry and the vulgar compensations doled out by equally unsympathetic governments?  Money to shut the mouths of victims groveling in poverty! A small price for children they can anyway do without!

Is that all we are capable of? Will the laws and law makers of this land always let the perpetrators of such crimes go scot free? Will those responsible never be hauled up and their faces never shown to the public? Will criminal charges never be pressed against such offenders, whether individuals, organizations or governments? Why don’t the media follow up after the child is dead? Why don’t they expose such criminals?

Because, most of the victims in the past have belonged to the poorest section of society. Their parents are daily wage earners; labourers who toil all day and their children, wallow by the sides, in heat, dust, rain or cold depending on which time of the year it is. No crèches, no day-cares, no ayahs or helps to watch over them while their parents toil to earn a few rupees to put food in their mouths at the end of the day. Parents, who can perhaps only watch from a distance and the corner of their eyes, as they dare not antagonize their contractors.

Are we to blame the children then for straying away and falling into death traps? Or are we to blame their parents for not taking good enough care of their wards? Can we even begin to imagine what it would be like for a toddler to be stuck in an eight inch diameter hole, in the darkest possible pit deep in the earth without light, food water; even without the familiar faces of those who love him/her?

And what about the huge cost involved in extricating these children? Who will bear it? Not the culprits we can be sure. And what about the loss of innumerable man hours, of the common and not so common people? People who include locals, government officials, doctors, engineers, army men and not to mention the media, watching these spectacles. And not to forget the man hours wasted by millions of viewers who sit glued to their TV sets, unable to do anything else because they just can’t get the distressing images out of their minds. And what about those who even get badly injured in doing these risky operations? Who will bear their pain?

And what about the huge amounts of equipment which are moved to these sites from other assignments, like cranes, earth movers, ambulances, trucks, army vehicles, staff cars etc, etc. Who will bear the cost of these?

No one in particular, but, everyone in general! At that moment of course, everyone wants to wear the Good Samaritan halo and enjoy even a little bit of glory; like the administrators who bask in media attention, giving sound bytes to a hungry media.