If we won't then who will??

I just came back after watching two movies at Cineworld. The first one was 'Role Models' and the second one 'Slumdog Millionare. Both movies poles apart. One a cheeky flick and the other one realistic and it has gained a special place in my collection of favorite movies.

Slumdog Millionaire story is about how a slum boy wins 20 million rupees and how he knew all the answers. But behind this story line are the incidents he goes through as a child. And that is what makes the movie so special. Not just because they are incidents that have occurred with them but because they are incidents that I think goes with most of the children that live in the slums and that are currently living on the streets.

This movie just bought tears to my eyes on several occasions. I don’t know the reason why my eyes felt so heavy with tears when I am used to seeing such children on the streets in my day-to-day life in Pakistan and yet ignore them easily. I couldn’t find an answer to why my heart was so broken after seeing those poor kids loose their mother in front of their eyes when I know there are millions of orphans on the streets on Pakistan left on the mercy of no one. And I couldn’t figure out a reason why my eyes went blur when I saw their 'slum' being thrashed and on fire but I easily flipped the channel the day before yesterday when a news came that a Slum in Karachi had caught fire killing 40 people with half of them children and their bodies were left on the hospital floor.

I don’t know why we react this way to movies but we just easily neglect these issues in our real life. How simple it is for us to just turn our backs or close our car window and distance ourselves from them. How easily we look away and try not to think and ignore as much as we can to the kid that bangs on our car or ignore a street kid who tries who run after us in a hope that we may change our mind, look at his dirty clothes and dark eyes and at least buy a flower worth just 3 pence. How dearly we just want our kids to look the best and feed them the best of food and just easily ignore and make small poor kids do our household chores. How easy it is for us to just avoid those kids on the streets with a broken limb, arm or been blinded but when I saw such a scene in the movie today, I just couldn’t look at the screen any more...!

I guess these are the realities of our lives that we want to run away from. This is a chapter of our society that we want to close and prefer not to look at. We do look at them and may be have pity on their poor conditions for a micro milli second of our precious time, but deep inside, our souls have died, our hearts just care about our loved ones and our mind is just so occupied that these small issues are not 'the' issues for us. And even if we want do something for them then we start and think so logically as to well how many children can we save? We can't save everyone. We can't really turn every slum into a small house of bricks. We can't provide all of these kids a proper meal of 2 times a day. We can't provide all of them with education. We can't safeguard their lives. We can't really do that can we?

Well if we won't then who will?...........