All I hear on desi TV is about the Noida killings. On the phone with family, everyone asks if we’ve heard of the heinous matter. Yes, we have. Again and again, publicised on TV as the “Shame of India”. Really ? And is that all ?

This really turns me into the Cynic-of-all-time. Why is everyone so surprised that something like this has happened ? Why is everyone so “shocked” to know (this time forcefully) that the Indian poor might as well be invisible as far as rights (human or legal) are concerned ? Didn’t we already know this fact ? NDTV conducted a poll asking people to air their views on whether justice was dependent on your financial status. Well, DUH ! Was there a need of a poll ? Is it not already amply clear ?

Why the horror, the shock and awe now ? Why no horror when one sees little kids begging ? Why no horror that at the same market where you see a group of small children wallow in filth picking through the overflowing trash heap, you see a cavalcade of cars hurrying away some minister in absolute luxury ? Why no horror when comfortably ensconsed in one’s AC car, you look out and see a raggedly clothed kid, wiping the car’s windshield at a red light ? We know, you and I, that if someone abused or killed this raggedly clothed kid, no one would give a shit.

The “shame” is everywhere. It’s in that moment when I buy my kid’s ice-cream from the ice-cream vendor at the neighborhood park and a little group of urchins gather to eye the ice-cream, because God knows if they have even had any food, let alone ice-cream, yet. It’s in that moment when at a traffic light, a boy as old as my kid’s comes up to try and sell little toys thorugh the window. He’s barefoot, dressed in tatters, and running around amid traffic trying to drum up some business. If he’s crushed by some oncoming car, do you think anyone will mourn ?It’s in my mother’s voice, thin and faint and broken over the phone, when she tells me of her visit to a kid’s school, a school for the very poor kids. She tells me that she has changed her mind to gift them pencil boxes and frivolities for Diwali and will instead take them a full meal, because she saw what they had for lunch. “Sukhi roti” she says, no sabzi, not even a little achaar, or onion, nothing else.

The shame is in seeing kid’s defeacating in the open drain of a little street, because they have no fit toilet to use, and then remembering all those inane emails I get about India’s achivements.

It IS shameful that while poor kid’s are considered dispensable the entire state machine is churned up when a “rich” kid is kidnapped. However the real shame is in the fact that we are surrounded by atrocities everyday, atrocities which we are inured too, and we don’t even squirm at their mention. We have withing us the knowledge that the law doen’t work for the poor. They are largely ignored, batted away. The rich have always had it good. The poor have always had it bad. Nothing new there. The Noida episode might just be the tip of the iceberg. Kid’s and women are trafficked, sold, live and work in places unfit for animals. However either it is under-reported or relegated to the back pages of the newspaper, or that we don’t care for the horrors of the poor around us, that we bat not an eyelid.

So, why the pretense now ?