My name is Prakash Sharma Lal. I know, it’s a weirdly long name given by my family. I miss my friends at school calling me PSL for fun. I miss my sister calling me Lal, which literally means ‘Dear’ in our language, too. The last time I saw my mother was 10 years back, on the day I was born, because she died as soon as I was born. Since then, I was raised only by my single father and elder sister, but I still have a younger brother. When I was 2 years, we had found a child who was hardly 2 hours old, dumped on the side of the road in a rubbish area, not a single passerby cared about it. Seeing the heartless citizens not giving a blink to the baby, it became my younger brother since then. We had taken it in even though my father’s income was already not stable to pay mine and my sister’s fees. He simply worked in a shoe’s factory, every day he would come back home stinking with the sent of leather and polish, and his needle cuts on his fingers and palm. It was not long ago my father died of cancer leaving the three of us behind. My 14-year-old sister had to drop out of school to support us a living. She started working in a cotton mill, she would come back home coughing her lungs out in the evening. My instincts told me that as the eldest male in the family I had to do something. Soon when I was 11, I too dropped out of school and started working as a daily wages’ laborer in a construction site, trying my best to prevent my palms from getting scratched by the load of bricks I carried on top of my head. The little brother of mine left studying too because sadly the two combined wages were not enough to cover his expenses. Now he helps me with the same so-called job of ours. During this time of my life, I realized that survival and food was more important than education of people like us. And, we had just become a part of those 10 million victims of child labor. And yet I dare to dream every night that I some sort of magic would happen and I would become a children’s rights activist.
Humans live on the same globe, yet their lives are so different. Unlike what some children might probably think that they are raised as studying machines without giving them a chance to think about what they really want, while some children are raised as working machines without basic human rights but a pawn in the game of survival. While someone is laughing, someone is crying. While someone is enjoying the pleasures of paper with rules the world, someone is losing hope of living and creating a hopeless future. But everyone has got a voice to speak up for rights, freedom, and democracy. While focusing one what this one thing we all have in common, we can help each other out with integrity. Don’t trust me, trust yourself, integrity is the most delicious flavor of life.
