The Game of Light and Darkness.

The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence. After reading my post some of you may think very highly of me. But for your kind information, this is a wrong way of thinking. I am not that generous.

The child is not getting a good living standard in my dwelling. He is an anomaly (mentally disabled). It is very hard to communicate with this child because he does not speak, by judging the expressing of his face we can tell when he is having a hard time to deal with something. This is not possible for us to spend a fair amount of time to take care of him. Today in the morning I figured that his teeth were bleeding but he did not weep at all. He had no idea how he got hurt.

From his attitude we can sense that he was lost from his family and he was forced to work as a beggar for some period of time of his life. He lives in a world that is messed up. Now his interference in our life is messing up our world.

He has the problem of uncontrolled bowel movement. He gets dirty with feces and wet cloths in the middle of the night. Somebody needs to wake up and clean him frequently at night. He makes himself dirtier by playing with his feces whenever he gets a chance. How long can we keep this up?

The greatest challenge to us is we do not have proper training to look after this mentally disabled child. All we have is some feeling of compassion which is of no use. He requires an individual place to live, constant caregiver assistant. This is beyond our financial capability to make such arrangement.

This child is spoiling our happy time. The worst thing is he is exposing us into moral vulnerability! He wants me to confront the inner beast within me. What if I give up the inner struggle and the beast shows up? The world will turn upside down! Will I be conspired to leave him in the railway-station?

At this moral point every good hearted people in the world would strongly disagree to do this, they would scream and say, I can never do that!

But I confess that I am not that great, I do not know anything about this game of uncertainty. We admire the light, the good part of life but we deliberately choose to ignore the dark part of this life.

*Isn’t that a nice photograph? You might think that the child has been covered in a cozy blanket. Just to let you know that it is an old rejected jacket. I was considering throwing it out!

(Once somebody accused me of being a 'Prothom Alo' hater. The reason for his blaming was my couple of posts where I criticized this newspaper. Not that I am particularly a big attacker of this newspaper. For various reasons my family subscribes this newspaper. I personally think their feature page 'Naksha' is a horrible thing to read, but to my surprise it provides life giving pleasure to other member of my family.

This is not a cheap newspaper; I have to pay 800 paisa every single day to buy it but it barely meets my expectations. Why on earth I have to allow all those crap that are being published in this newspaper? As I have no choice but to subscribe and read this newspaper, my eyes cannot ignore the inconsistencies of their published news and writings. Sometimes it is hard for me tolerate their unfairness.

Today there is an article written by Shumona Sharmeen named ‘khide pete ghum’ published in the section ‘chutir dine’ which is very heart touching. A previously published picture has been attached to this article where a child is sleeping on the ground. As far as I know, Shumona Sharmeen is one of the top positioned officials of Prothom Alo. She has written in a touchy tone.

I do not mean to give any detrimental opinion about her emotional writing. But it would be difficult for the common readers not to have any deep emotional response towards this article. After reading this, they will be quiet convinced that this newspaper cares about people’s well being and every single page of this newspaper contains enough miserable stories about life to touch readers heart!

I wrote about this four years old child before. I requested a local representative of Prothom Alo to publish news about this missing child. Even though every other newspaper did that but Prothom Alo did not pay attention to my request. I do not put blame on that local representative, he has limited authority. He did send the news to main office but it was no value to them.

I did not get very disappointed because it was an expected response from them. How can they provide some space in the page of the newspaper for a least significant child in the society?

They would rather publish the news about what ‘color of sharee’ the leader wears. The wedding news of ‘bang babaji’ comes to the front page; where else can they accommodate a missing child’s news? It is all about making money, nothing else matters! But when I read about pathetic article ‘khide pete ghum’, I felt sick in my stomach and wanted to throw up just for a relief. What a naked hypocrisy!) Original post

**English translation by: Tithi, Canada**