How can POVERTY change DREAMS ?

Poverty involves lack of human and physical assets and inadequate material means to acquire food and other necessities. But it also means vulnerability to ill-health, drought, job loss, economic decline, violence, and societal conflict. And it often means a deep condition of disempowerment, even humiliation. Poverty is something one is born into, it has many dimensions. The adolescent age in which we dream about becoming astronauts and movie stars, poverty shatters all such dreams of the children in poor families as they are burdened with a lot of responsibilities to earn a living to support their families. They have to work in miserable Conditions and leave school. When getting three meals a day is a task, dreams and ambitions take a backseat. Some children accept the harsh reality of poverty being a vicious cycle with no open end. Even if these children have big dreams, they more often than not do not have the proper means and resources to fulfill them. At very earlier they're burdened with responsibilities and they are forced to work in harsh conditions.

New Delhi symbolises the modern face of ‘superpower India' with its glitzy malls, expensive pubs, Page 3 parties, multiplexes and socialites dressed in the likes of Guccis and Armanis. Amidst the glamour lies the rapidly growing underbelly of this massive city that is routinely ignored and marginalised to avoid any confrontation with the ‘new New Delhi' of shining India. This underbelly constitutes a huge mass of Indian people who live in abysmally inhuman conditions fighting for survival and a little dignity that usually eludes them.

These are the slum-dwellers and the homeless of this city who brave nature, government officials, police, traffickers, organ traders, rapists, extortionists, murderers, gangsters, real estate goons, etc all with a dream that their children should not be condemned to live and die like them. In the slums of the arid, dusty and backward suburb of New Seemapuri in east Delhi live such dreams, festering with rage and desire, dying and dead, to be re-born again. They are not deterred by the brutish forces that push them to surrender their hopes of a better future in a democracy, usurped by the rich and powerful. Life goes on relentlessly in pulsating rhythm, despite the subhuman realism of their lives.

Whenever I go back from my college, I observe poor children begging on red lights saying “didi humei bhi padhna hai”. When I see the innocence and a burning dream in their eyes, it makes me cry and guilty. As youth, what are we really doing for them? The very answer of this question is we are engrossed in our own lives and we have no time to think of others. We need to stop helping people in the name of charity or just for the sake of uploading a picture on instagram. One of them puts it, "We live in poverty but that doesn't take our right to dream. And that's why I dream. For a better life, a better future. For our children. Because we too, they too, have a right to inherit the fruits of democracy, don't they?"It’s high time that we wake up because the nation needs a revolution.

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