By Azaan Javaid for TwoCircles.net
"Tariq Aziz is a terrorist, but I am not" says the 19-year-old Tariq, in a dingy room located within the by-lanes of Pahar Gunj while addressing a group of foreigners and a few locals. Tariq (full name Tariq Aziz) said this while referring to the Ex- Foreign minister of Sadam Hussien . The audience breaks the awkward silence with a roar of laugh. Tariq’s “I am not a terrorist” bit came towards the end of the event called The City Walk. “Have you heard anyone by the name Tariq, excluding myself” The crowd responded with Tariq Ali, the writer and Tariq the football player in the United States. “Not them” said Tariq, I even know a Pakistani TV personality who shares my name, I am talking about Sadam’s man”. Only fascinated by the sharing a name and nothing more, Tariq acknowledge one interesting social reality: allegiance is everything.
Street children in the shadows of "war on terror."
Tariq had first visited Pahar Gunj when he chose to run away from his native home to have a better life in Delhi. He was then a nine-year-old boy in the capital of India, who had escaped home following a violent beating by his father. Tariq is one of the hundreds of kids who are being sheltered, educated and even placed in various white collar jobs by Salaam Balaak Trust, which is headed by Praveen Nair. Praveen, a social activist, is also the mother of Mira Nair whose film Salaam Bombay(1988) was about the lives of streets kids of India. Salaam Balaak was in fact established in the year 1988 by Nair and Sonjoy Roy, a renowned theater personality, to help out street kids, majority of whom are runaways, lost and abandoned by their parents. With the fear of begging mafia, trafficking and forced prostitution looming at large, Salaam Balak is one such organization that has been at loggerheads with organized crime in India.
City walk , as claimed by the organizers, is one such social engineering mechanism which was originally put forth by one of the volunteers of the Salam Balaak named John Thomson. The walk is part of a programme to sensitize the people about the lives of the street kids and their rehabilitation Now awaiting his higher secondary results, Tariq has volunteered to become a tour guide for the same. The guides are trained in English language and communication skills in order to address their guests without any hassle. “I am learning English and I plan to learn Spanish too” says the exuberant teen who upon his arrival faced the wrath of Delhi police's daily beatings. This was followed by his addiction to drugs making rag picking his profession 10 years later, the new, detoxified Tariq leads his guests like the pied-piper into the narrow lanes of Pahargunj for two straight hours. Drenched in zeal rather than sweat the ‘city walkers’ give a patient ear to Tariq. Visiting the shelter homes, the shop owners (who are customers to the rag pickers) and the nearest police station is part of the itinerary which aims at assimilating the guests.
A new lot of children had recently arrived who have been now stationed in one of the boy shelters in Pahar Gunj. The City walk group is taken to a carpeted hall, where some of the boys are busy playing while others are being taught mathematics by couple of volunteers. Some having more of an artistic inclination busy themselves, replicating the text on charts which include name of fruits, vegetables and a poster with toddlers holding the flags of Israel. Among the children housed in the shelter are kids belonging to various religious minorities, Muslims being one of them. Mohsin Ali is one such boy who has recently joined the trust. Originally belonging to Bangladesh, Mohsin does not find Israeli flags as amusing as the group of foreigners, given the fact that his country of origin refuses to recognize Israel as a state. Neither does it affect Rajab from India. But for the foreigners it’s a joy to see symbols of the ‘civilized’ all over India, a place which is much in need of solidarity of the developed countries. According to Poonam Sharma, a co-ordinator/communications at the Salaam Balak Trust, over 5000 people from 80 different countries have so far joined the walk. “In 2011, a well renowned International channel did a story on poverty tourism and had included our walk in that. Can you believe that, we here are against this culture of showing off the miserable state of people just to earn money. On contrary, we show stories of hope and success”.
The list of The Salaam Balak alumni is quite impressive too. A photographer, a designer and a Delhi Metro official are some of the success stories that the Trust has proudly displayed on one of its boards. Given Tariq’s wit and speaking skills, he sure is all set to become a part of the success stories. The larger question however remains, with such a huge vacuum within the education and knowledge dissemination area, who should possess the sole power of molding the lives of these young lads. The reasons behind the sad state of street children may be many, but one of the overarching one remains poverty- manufactured poverty. Tariq answers to the question of whether the children here come from any particular community or the neglected parts of the society “Nothing like that, we celebrate all festivals here, I love holi. But yes there are children who have run away from the Madrassas of UP and Bihar. Madarasa! The one which Muslims have.”
Sitting in her humid office, Poonam says, we here believe that all these kids have a ‘runaway gene’ which is good and bad. Bad because they sometimes run from our premises to their previous lives to earn money, good because the run-away gene for some might mean that they aspire to have a better life, that’s why they ran away from their horrible past to be at Salaam Balak”.
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Azaan Javaid is a Kashmiri journalist based in New Delhi. He is the author of Social Media in Kashmir: A Case study of the Free Faizan Campaign 2011
