Barely a day after Children's Day, I saw a heart-tugging sight in the morning.
I had just dragged myself out of my still-warm quilt, yawned, instructed my maid to get breakfast ready, peeped in the mirror to see if I had sprouted some sudden pimple(none, whew!),and ambled to pick the newspapers my newspaper guy throws expertly on my third-floor balcony daily.
What I saw below make me stand still for several seconds.
Several kids were cooped up in what could only be described as a cage, attached to a bicycle.
You could say it looked like a closed rickshaw, with about ten kids, all trussed together like sardines.
The cyclist was pedaling furiously, no doubt doing his best to make the tiny tots reach their nearby crèche on time.
I saw them till as far as my eyes could see, and then went into a thoughtfull spell.
It wasn’t just the sight of those bleary-eyed kids making their way reluctantly to school, or the image that made me break out in a sweat, thanks to my acute claustrophobia.
It was the unfairness of it all—those tiny bundles of energy all caged like some stray animals being taken to be put to sleep, or worse, to the nearest abattoir.
A tiny window with bars was the only piece of ventilation the kids had; the iron door as opaque and hideous as ever.
It was also their only peephole to a colorful world outside.
Almost like the jharokhas through which princesses from Rajasthan would see the world, with their deep-kohl lined eyes.
It's almost like putting a lid on what you can see.
What a pity!
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