Eliminating Classroom Hunger

Blogger in me loves doing different things, loves experimenting with different topics and what better do you want than knowing that a blog post will make a difference to someone. That’s exactly what it would.

From little Satish who throws the newspaper to my balcony to the tiny chhotu who serves me hot tea in office, we all come across a number of little kids who cannot go to school, just because they need to work to earn a bread for themselves and their families. That is what you call ‘classroom hunger’, a typical scenario we often notice in our daily lives but still choose to ignore, probably since it is not within our own lives. With God’s grace, we have been lucky enough to have an availability of basic facilities in our lives.

While I write these lines, I would like to share with you an incident which made me ponder over the topic I am discussing with you. A couple of years back, I was in Mumbai with 2 of my friends. We were enjoying the serene atmosphere and having fun at the Marine Drive. It would be around 9.45-10 when three kids came to us and started selling some children books. While the books seemed of no interest, we still got involved in asking rates of various books just to pass time. But at one moment, while one of the kids was telling us the rate of Nursery rhyme book, the other chhotu started singing those nursery rhyme. This indeed touched us, since they were selling those books to collect some money to get into a mid-day school itself so that they could learn. They told that they learned whatever their customers taught them through their own books and they were very eager to learn more. But they could not since they have a family to support and they are the ones who are feeding them. Their dedication to education was what inspired us to purchase few books from them, just because we wanted to help them but they refused to have anything in charity. Another thing that touched us was that while they seemed so helpless to us since they could not even learn, they had learned the art of being happy. I also clicked a pic of them to inspire me to be happy unconditionally.

Lets Learn to be Unconditionally Happy!

However. this incident also brings me face-to-face with a reality that many kids suffer from ‘classroom hunger’ and there is a great need to eliminate this classroom hunger. Children in poor families are often made to work to act as a helping hand to the main bread-earning member of the family. Lesser do they realize that educating the children will sow more sweet fruits in the future.  These days, a new serial is also featuring on Colors TV titled ‘Udaan’ which also highlights the need of education to the poverty-ridden families and shows the transformation in the life of a village girl and her family after she is exposed to formal education system. So, the need of the hour is spreading awareness about the importance of education and discouraging the child labour practices in the country.

So, lets eliminate classroom hunger and instead let’s join hands to see in them ‘hunger to learn’. Proud to be associated with Bloggers’ Social Responsibility Initiative.

I am going to #BlogToFeedAChild with Akshaya Patra and BlogAdda.

Categories: akshaypatra, blogadda, classroom hunger