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?