Homeless Deaths and Apathy

She calls out to the man on the street
"Sir, can you help me?
It's cold and I've nowhere to sleep,
Is there somewhere you can tell me?"
 

This is a small excerpt of Phil Collin's song, Another Day in Paradise. I'm sure most of you have heard it at some point of your life. Its a rather honest song, speaking of the bitter and harsh realities of the world we live in.

 

This first verse speaks of a homeless woman. It's cold, and she, being homeless, does not have a bed to sleep in. This is the case is many cities across the world, but what I'm trying to talk about here is the recent headlines regarding the deaths of various homeless people due to the bitter and harsh cold in North India.

 

India has roughly 1 billion people, according to the World Bank estimate in 2011. Did you know, that according to the Action Aid programme in 2003, there are roughly 78 million homeless people in India? That's 7.8 percent of our population.

 

How many of you take notice of these people? How many of you go out of you way to help them? And no, school/college club activities don't count. How many of you have stepped out of your home to look at the outside world. For us, it is just "another day in paradise". For them, it is a fight for survival every day, in a concrete jungle filled with apathetic people.

 

How many of us are even aware of the various thing happening in our country when the media does not report it? How many of us CARE before the media TELLS us to care?

 

Granted, the media is doing their job. They are to report what goes on the country and the world, but now, the unfortunately truth is that we don't care. We don't care about the millions of children dying in Africa. We don't care about the children and students in America who get shot. We don't care.

 

What do we care about? Ourselves.

 

He walks on, doesn't look back
He pretends he can't hear her
Starts to whistle as he crosses the street
Seems embarrassed to be there.

 

They beg, they endure, they cry. They want to be able to afford food for themselves and their children and themselves. They want to be able to send their children to school and not have to destroy their childhood to make them work so that there is food on the table. They want to be able to depend on something, to have a constant that they can lean back on. That yes, we have this.

 

But they don't.

 

We walk past slums every day, and many of us make disgusted faces at the unsanitary condition. We consider them a black mark on our country. We displace them to make more buildings for people with money to own, but never stop to think of the people who had made their HOME there. But we never stop to think, WHY are they unsanitary?

 

We don't realise it. We don't see beyond the "ugly" facade.

 

So when they die, no one cares.

 

Where are the human rights institutions?

 

I think the better question is, WHERE ARE WE?

The Plea of a Dreamer

I suppose that most of you think we're naive. That we have a world view that is rose-tinted and that when we step into the BIG BAD WORLD, that world view will be shattered. Others think its cute, that it is merely a stage that we will grow out of.

But what most people don't get is the simple fact that without the Dreamer, there would be no change. Without the Dreamer, there wouldn't be a world. Without the Dreamer, there would be no transport, no countries, no laws.

Because without a Dreamer, there is no innovation. The Dreamer strives on Idealism. It is his petrol to his car. Without the belief that there CAN be a change, the Dreamer is merely a Cynic, cleverly disguised in the garb of the Dreamer.

So when we 'grow up', as you say, we can become anything. The Cynic faces the 'harsh reality'. Others will go to the path of the Sentimentalist, and seek and place emotional value in every occurrence in the world around them, allowing it to shape them as it will. As Oscar Wilde once said, in his play Lady Windermere's Fan, "What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market place of any single thing.”

The Dreamer's path is the path that very few choose, and even then, many veer off this path to safer and more compliant paths. This is not because this path is more difficult than any other path. Its is because the world we live in, regardless of its need for Dreamers, tries to crush all innovation, any ideas that may displace the "ruling ideology".

Sociologically speaking, this is normal, and the compliant often end up attempting to socialise the thought process into the possible deviants- Do not try anything out of the ordinary or too risky. There is no harm in staying on the safe side. In Sociology, it repeatedly stated, particularly under the Marxist perspective, that society runs on conflict. There will always be people who are oppressed and then those who rise up on top.

In our society, it is the Dreamer who take on the role of the Oppressed and the Cynics and Sentimentalists who take the role of the Oppressor. Regardless, there are people who stay strong and endure the taunts of society. The taunts that tell them that they are naive and that they look at the world through rose-tinted eyes.

But it is the Dreamers who stand tall in history- Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Buddha, Maria Montessori, the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi.

These are all men and women who stood tall in the face of adversity, willing to believe that their dreams were not stupid, were not naive and were attainable. They reached for the sky and they got it. They lost a lot on their way there, but they gained just as much.

So when you tell us that our dreams are 'invalid', when you tell us that they are all pipe-dreams that cannot be actualised, when you tell us that we are naive little 'children' who know nothing about the world, remember this. We may be young, but that means our eyes aren't jaded like yours. That means that we often see the world for what it is, and not what people want us to see it as.

Because while there is nothing wrong with being a Cynic or a Sentimentalist, there is nothing wrong with being a Dreamer.

Because we are the people standing up for our rights. We are the people working to change the world, to stop global warming, to end war and striving for peace. We are the ones who want equality, to have safe roads to drive and walk on. We are the ones to stand up and make a stand against the disgusting habits of society while so many of you stay at home and pity others.

So when you look at us with that scorn in your eyes, it is not because we are inferior. It is because a part of you wishes to be like us. And you need to understand that there is nothing wrong with that desire. But making us feel like we are the ones who are wrong, like we are the ones to blame will only take this world several steps back.

So here on, please see that we too have our use. We are not useless. We are not stupid. We are not naive.

We are human beings like you, out to heal a world filled with hatred and misery that is so deeply embedded that an entire species feels it like a unanimous, collected heartbeat.