The Lost Spring, a piece by
Anees Jung highlights the plight of child rag-pickers and children working in the
bangle making industry in India and it is a lesson in the English Textbook at the grade twelve level. It makes sense for more affluent students to read this lesson because it describes the plight of children whose childhood has been snatched away from them.
Unfortunately, the greatest tragedy is that these people are
not able to emancipate themselves even if they want to! This is because years of 'mind-numbing toil' in dingy hutments have robbed them of the will to strive for a better life. They have become literally zombified, have been forced to accept their circumstances as a gift of destiny, a 'god-given lineage' that none can dare to break.
When Anees asks a group
of young men, bangle makers in Firozabad why they don’t organise themselves “into
a cooperative”, their answer is that “Even if (they) get organised, (they) are
the ones who will be hauled up by the police, beaten and dragged to jail for
doing something illegal”. So, it is evident that there are vested interests that don't want child labour to be abolished in the country.
Children like
Saheb and Mukesh are stuck between two worlds, a world of superstition, dead
rituals, orthodox beliefs, and the conviction that one is born into a caste -
in this case, Mukesh is born into a caste of bangle makers, therefore it is “his
Karam, his destiny” to be a bangle-maker. To even think of breaking out of this
“god-given lineage” is unthinkable according to Mukesh’s grandmother. Mukesh
has a dream, a dream of becoming a motor mechanic, but then one wonders if society will ever allow him to change his profession. Bangle making is a child
intensive industry and it is clear that laws are doing little to address this
problem. In many cases, it is a lack of will to implement laws, that prevents the
eradication of child labour, in others, it is about lack of knowledge about this
social evil. Apathy towards the problem of child labour, procrastination, the
presence of greedy middlemen, commission agents and politicians are a few
other reasons why child labour continues to exist in our society today!
The title of the lesson, “Lost
Spring” is evocative of a major social evil that abounds in our
society even today. It suggests lost opportunities, lost innocence, lost
happiness, and lost hope. In a nutshell, it spells out how poverty has robbed
children of their childhood. In some cases, there are natural forces that
conspire to keep people and children in a state of perpetual poverty. In the
case of Saheb, it was because of “the many storms that swept away their
fields and homes” that forced his family and him to migrate to “the big city”
in search of “gold”. In India, we have come across people who
have left their homes, and often happy lives to join the film industry in
Mumbai. Many were left destitute as their dreams for a better life soured in no
time. Rag pickers like Saheb might scrounge for gold in the garbage bins but
the only gold they might recover could be limited to a ten-rupee note! In Saheb's case, it was a matter of survival, fleeing from a natural calamity that had destroyed their lives.
That poverty breeds even more
poverty can be inferred from a case study of rag pickers all over the country.
What begins as a game of scrounging in garbage bins, (that proves exciting when they get a ten-rupee note) soon becomes a harsh struggle for survival as children born in
rag-pickers families become “partners in survival”! Hard though it may seem,
these children soon grow into their profession and they begin to find some kind
of comfort in their profession. Thus, for Saheb, rag-picking was an easier task
than working at the tea stall because according to Anees, “The steel canister
seems heavier than the plastic bag he would carry so lightly….The bag was his.
The canister belongs to the man who owns the tea shop.”
The “rags to riches” story does
not work for children like Saheb, or even Mukesh! Films like Slumdog Millionaire
might romanticise poverty and the abrupt turn of fortune, but the reality is
worse. Poverty is a vicious circle, a whirlpool that sucks in hapless victims
and never lets them go! In many ways, I would say that Lost Spring is a rather
disturbing lesson that brings out the tragedy called child labour. This is
surely a lesson that disrupts our sense of security and forces us to step out
of our comfort zone. Lack of education and unemployment are some of the factors that indeed conspire to force children into child labour. The other factors stem from these two factors. Lack of awareness, natural calamities, apathy, poor enforcement of laws, rules and regulation, and of course lack of will are all extenuating factors. The question of education does come in the story when without thinking, the narrator asks him if he would like to join school if she opened one and readily replies, "Yes" with a smile. Unfortunately, this was quite like the promises that are made and broken at will in his world. Yes, there are not enough schools to accommodate slum children, but then one wonders if only opening schools would solve the problem of child labour. Stephen Spender very clearly hints that one cannot educate a child who has an empty stomach in his poem, An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum!
Reference:
Flamingo: Textbook for class XII
(Core Course)
Lost Spring
(Stories of Stolen Childhood by Anees Jung)
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