Street Children of Delhi
"Some youngsters sleep on top rated of water heaters or on the roofs of fruit stands. Other people climb up onto the tin awnings at night," says Shekhar Saini. "They like to be higher up so the rats do not bite them when they sleep."
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My husband and I are hurrying by way of the noisy crowded Delhi train station trying to keep up with Shekhar. He guides us around snoring beggars, tottering mountains of luggage, packs of scurrying rats and tea sellers rushing by with their steaming metal pots. Shekhar's dark eyes are lively. He narrates our walk by means of the station with passionate warmth and confident ease. I'm impressed with his exceptional English. He's wearing a fashionably faded denim jacket and jeans. His thick dark hair is neatly combed and parted at the side.
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I read an report about Shekhar, an aspiring Bollywood actor, in a Canadian magazine and contacted him immediately upon our arrival in Delhi. I wanted to arrange certainly one of his exceptional tours, which gives guests a glimpse in to the lives with the extra than 100,000 homeless kids who reside on Delhi's streets. Shekhar employed to produce his home amid the rotting garbage, wandering cows, rusty bicycles and animal excrement on the narrow winding streets surrounding the busy train station. He's the perfect individual to show guests about.
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A modest boy grabs my arm with his sticky hands begging for income. He's wearing a heavily stained bulky green sweater. His nose is bubbling with mucus. The skin on his arms is dry and flaking. His eyes are red rimmed, and barely visible under a shock of straw-like hair. He does not have any pants on! I can see his tiny bare brown bum. "He's an 'off the street kid', Shekhar says shooing him away. There are two types of street children in Delhi. 'Off the street' children are those born to homeless parents. They have grown up on the streets of Delhi. 'Off the street kids' beg to get a living and give the funds to their parents. 'On the street kids' are these that have run away from house since they were getting physically or sexually abused. Some were abandoned by their households since they had mental or physical disabilities or because they did not study difficult sufficient and weren't carrying out well at school. They've created their approach to Delhi from different components of India in search of a far better life or simply an escape. 'On the street kids' are much more likely to be operating as an alternative to begging.
"Watch for pickpockets" Shekhar warns us. Many rival gangs manage the 2,500 children who reside in and about the train station. Gang leaders approach the practically 50 new runaway kids who arrive in Delhi by train daily, and attempt to persuade them to work for their gang as prostitutes or choose pockets. Every gang leader has staked out certainly one of the station's bustling platforms as their territory to 'do business'. Vicious fights break out between the gangs when these boundaries aren't respected and then the police move in to beat the warring factions into peaceful cooperation.
Shekhar tells us having a tinge of pride in his voice that not all children who live within the train station make a living with illegal enterprises. "They're not lazy" Shekhar says almost defensively. Some carry luggage, others shine shoes, provide food, or pick up garbage. They give the 60 or 70 rupees they earn every day to one of the lots of food stand owners within the station who act as their 'bankers' for a 20% cut of their profits. In return the stand owner will let them sleep on his roof out of your way from the a large number of rats that roam the station. When the police come nosing about looking to arrest homeless kids, the food stand proprietiers will lie towards the officers and say the street kids reside with them and work for them.
Shekhar stops when my husband calls out to him and asks a question about a pair of youngsters barefoot and jacketless in the January cold huddled in a corner sniffing some thing from a bottle. Shekhar says its 'White Out'. "They can obtain it at any common store", he tells us "and it offers them a cheap high." Shekhar points out other kids camped involving the steel tracks ready to jump on arriving trains to look for discarded food scraps ahead of the new passengers flood the automobiles. They all look so young to me. Shekhar says the homeless children in the station are involving 5 and 18 but most are around age ten. We're just about out of the station just before I comprehend I have observed hardly any girls. "30% on the youngsters who run away from home in India are girls" Shekhar tells me, "but you won't see quite a few of them on the street. Pimps lure them into brothels nearly as soon as they arrive in Delhi."
Shekhar stops beneath some trees near the station to inform us his story. He grew up within the state of Bihar and ran away from property at age 12. Shekhar had started smoking and drinking and his parents stated he was an embarrassment to them. "Why on the planet did I leave home", he mentioned to himself when he arrived in the Delhi railroad station without money or buddies. A different boy within the station took him to a Sikh temple that gave out free of charge food and sooner or later Shekhar got function as a rag picker collecting boxes, cans and paper for recycling.
It was whilst carrying out this job that he met John Thompson the man who would adjust his life. Thompson was from London and worked for the Salaam Baalak Trust. It is an agency started by Bollywood director Mira Nair famous for movies like Monsoon Wedding and Mississippi Masala. Nair uses a portion with the earnings from her films to fund a charitable organization that tries to provide street kids in Delhi with a property and an education. Johnson lured Shekhar into 1 the shelters run by the Salaam Baalak Trust by promising him clean clothes in addition to a likelihood to watch Television. Shekhar stayed, learned English, graduated from high school and started to dream of becoming an actor. Johnson thought they really should place Shekhar's dramatic talent to work with. He came up together with the notion of offering tours to educate visitors regarding the lives of homeless kids in Delhi. Shekhar has been conducting the tours for several years now but is still pursuing a probable Bollywood profession. This year he is taking jazz dance lessons in addition to a Shakespearean acting class. He asked me if I had every observed A Mid Summer Night's Dream and talked excitedly about a recent overall performance.
The following stop on our tour was certainly one of the seven get in touch with points the trust runs in Delhi. Children can come right here for healthcare care, condoms, food as well as a likelihood to discover English. When we arrived a young artist was busy painting a colorfully illustrated English alphabet onto the wall.
