Children are so simple, so spontaneous, so honest, they can not be easily understood by the reasoning, reflecting, and survival-fighting complicated adults. Poor children confuse adults more because while they display their stark body, they do not bare their soul, they do not beg for sympathy. I learned this when I ran into a five-year old holding a dead chick in his hands and talking to it, kissing it and finally burying it. When I offered him my sympathy, he looked at me plainly with disbelief. "Oh,! I have another one at home," he said and walked away from me. There was hardly any reflection of his insecurity in his gesture; sort of an aloof, quiet, matter-of-the-fact behaviour. Totally oblivious to the future that befalls him. The sight of dirty, unkempt, destitute children always evokes the realization that humans after all are the people of earth. Half-nude children sitting on dirt mounds laced with animal and human excreta, playing with broken plastic toys infested with germs bring out the feeling of empathy that soon and gets replaced with an awry feeling of helplessness when you see so many of them in the streets of Pakistan. These poor souls have little idea about who they are and where they are going to end up. In families of seven to ten children where both parents work labour jobs to bring enough bread home to feed, most of these children are left to Nature's mercy and to Nature's indiscretions. Why should these children be recipient of such cruelty of Nature? Devoid of any future, these human embryos face astronomical odds against their survival to normal happy adults; almost one-fifth die before they reach the age of 15. Those who survive face the rigors of pollution, germ infestations and chemical poisoning that leaves a majority of them mentally deranged and physically unfit to reach their full biologic potential. Those who beat these biologic odds face the oddity of the society they live in: suffering, humiliation, exploitation, demeaning, degradation, pain, both mental and physical, and a daily fight of survival. How unfortunate, painful and unjust is this arrangement of Nature? We are all children of God, one God, one Creator, one Provident, one owner of our destiny. Then why there is such gross injustice to mankind? Perhaps these are children of a lesser god.

[03 February 1995]