Stanley ka dabba

A few days back, I watched the Hindi movie ‘Stanley ka dabba’ (translated Stanley’s lunch box) written, directed and produced by Amole Gupte. I had heard some good reviews about the movie but had no idea what the movie was about except it was a children’s movie. It is a story about a fourth grader boy named Stanley who studies in an English medium school. Stanley is smart, funny, sweet and well liked by his teachers and classmates. So, for all appearances, Stanley is a normal boy. There is only one thing amiss….Stanley never brings a lunch box to school. During the course of the movie, you figure out something is wrong somewhere….when Stanley fills his stomach drinking water during the snack break…..when Stanley’s friends share their lunch with him because he does not have a lunch box….when he lies that he has the money to buy lunch because he does not want to keep eating lunch from his friends…..you know something is wrong…yet, you can’t place a finger on it…..because Stanley is a very happy child. The truth is revealed at the very end of the movie…..Stanley is an orphan…..his parents died in a motorcycle accident leaving him with his Chacha (uncle – father’s brother) who has no love for him, who hits him regularly and who makes the young boy work hard at the small restaurant that he owns…cleaning dishes and doing sundry work…..and that is Stanley’s reality. The message against child labor that the movie wished to convey came across to me loud and clear for 2 reasons….one, the movie is not preachy….the message is conveyed in the form of the following note at the end of the movie…..’Over 12 million Stanleys work as child laborers in India. A far greater number are exploited in the guise of family ties. Independent estimates place child laborers in India at over 50 million.’ Two, the character of Stanley himself (portrayed nicely by Amole Gupte’s son Partho). Stanley is not a whiner…given his circumstances, he displays a maturity which even most grown-ups don’t. Reading the overwhelming statics on child labor in India, I checked UNICEF’s website to find that UNICEF estimates that around 150 million children aged 5-14 in developing countries, about 16 per cent of all children in this age group, are involved in child labor all over the world. ILO estimates that throughout the world, around 215 million children under 18 work, many full-time.

Sometime back, I had read an interview of Amitabh Bachchan….Start interview excerpt ….Recalling his earlier days, Bachchan said when he was young, it was considered very important for a person like him to be a graduate and even then he too was unable to find a job and used to spend his evenings meeting friends who were also grads and still unemployed. He said that at one such meeting, one friend said that all their problems arose from the fact that their parents had brought them into this world without their permission. The filmstar said on that night he asked his father why he had brought him into this world without his permission. Amitabh said at that time, his father did not say anything but next morning, he kept a poem on his pillow in which he had said that no parent in their family had sought their children's permission for bringing them into this world. Harivanshrai also wrote that if it were possible for Amitabh, he should ask for the permit of his children before they were born…..End interview excerpt.

And isn’t that the truth for all of us….no one asks us our permission before we come into this world…..where we are born and to whom is not in our hands….I know my children and I are one of the lucky few who were born to families that care, nurture, protect and who can afford to take care of us. And then there are those many children all over the world……born to families that cannot afford to educate them, born in circumstances that force them to start working at a very young age, born in circumstances where they can never experience what a carefree childhood means.

As a young girl, when I was in Mumbai….rushing to catch the 9.05 am local train from Andheri to Chuchgate, I used to see many children working….as shoe polish boys, at the tea stalls, selling flowers, even in the trains selling bindis, earrings and clips….and honestly, never once did it occur to me that these children shouldn’t be working…that they should be in school. And even today, that voice in my head is telling me that apart from writing this blog post, there really isn’t anything else that I am doing against child labor….and I must admit, I am feeling very small indeed.

Signing off strongly believing that an education is every child’s right and child labor which exploits children is just inhumane and this snippet from a poem by William Blake

‘When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.’