Our Social Consciousness

OUR SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

As a student writing on social affairs..I often wonder if my articles would make any difference or whether this is essentially exploitative. The dilemma isn’t original. Journalists and photographers struggle with it all the time. Mostly I ignore it. But it niggles.

So, I was commissioned by a children’s charity(during my internship) to interview a single mum it’s been working with. She had five kids; black mould spreads thickly across her kitchen ceiling and down the back wall. One of her daughters, a little girl with asthma, sleeps in a pink bedroom so icily cold..I felt my skin shrink when I looked in (Delhi and its winter) A single photograph of a baby lost to cot death was unobtrusively placed among the many pictures of her other children displayed in the front room.

There’s a housing association building site at the end of the terraced row, but this woman can’t get hold of the rupees 28,000 she needs to secure one of the warm, dry family houses that will soon be available.

I write my piece feeling angry and hopeless. I wrestle with the thought that I should do something to help her… probably give her a lump-sum amount… but I don’t…let’s just say that I can’t.

A year has gone by, and I still wonder if I should have done it. They’re the people of whom I write about (I mean for the school/college magazines) And then I disappear off, my notebook full, my internship ending… and I NEVER see them again. Does this kind of internship/charity-work change anything? I don’t know. It’s what I did, what I could have done.. I know it’s not enough.

I did not pursue that internship because I wanted to stiff as many people as possible. I did it because stuff goes badly wrong in certain bits of public life and in the small way that writing articles allows, I want to ask why – then persuade, cajole, flatter or embarrass people into giving me the answer.

The judgments that I made for my “charity-work” may be taken fast, but they weren’t taken lightly. I loved doing that internship. The access and insight I got was central to why I am still writing / thinking about the job. But returning to my original question, does this kind of charity-work change anything..? The question still un-answered..!

 

                                                                                                                          Devyani

                                                                                                                                    CIM - INDORE