Fair, slim, and born again!

Many a time I have been asked, “Are you born again?” On most occasions it was as if the questioners had erected a wall around them and I did not have the password to enter their gated community. Each time my face wore a puzzled look.
There are many who behave as if being born again means gaining membership to an exclusive club of the “saved”. I recently encountered one such youngster who told me she was interested in apologetics, the science of defending the faith. It is fine as long as it is to assert one’s convictions, but more often than not it boils down to being critical of other religions or world views.
The term ‘born again’ apparently became popular with the evangelical Christian renewal in the United  States in the 1960s. But it was perhaps Charles Wendell Colson, better known as Chuck Colson, who gave a cultural construct to it with his book Born Again, where he speaks of his conversion. He was one of those named in the Watergate conspiracy. He later found the Prison Fellowship International.
With the many renewal movements in different churches in India, the idea gained ground here too.
The unquestioning Christian enthusiasm is now bandied about in matrimonial columns as one of the personality traits or possessions that a prospective bride or groom seeks.
Sample this:
Wanted Brides—Born again 26/178/fair/slim, BE work IT field, boy seeks born again, simple girl working at … able to converse in English from spiritual family….
The fetish for ‘fair’ skin or ‘wheatish’ complexion only shows the entrenched caste bias in our community. A born-again Christian ought to judge a person by ‘the content of his or her character’ rather than the ‘colour of their skin’. 
But the quintessential Christian family [in Kerala] that is interested in dowry needs more than just educational and professional qualifications to find the ‘perfect’ match! It needs a rhetorical label such as‘born again’.
What is the meaning of being ‘born again’ if it is not about acquiring new attitudes? The Oxford Dictionary of Learning says: born-again, adjective, “relating to or denoting a person who has converted to a personal faith in Christ (with reference to John 3:3)”.
Just how is a personal relationship with Christ life-changing? For instance, what should be the born-again Christians’ attitude towards money? Many think it is the password to attaining riches. The signature verse for televangelists promising such prosperity is John 10: 10: “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”
But the Scripture also says that when the multitudes that came out to be baptised by John the Baptist asked him, ‘What then shall we do?’, he answered them: “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise… and be content with your wages.”
Jesus spent more time among the poor than among the rich. In his Sermon on the Mount, he says, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth ... but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.”
But any such talk is sneered at. I remember how a friend’s sermon about making ethical choices in investments was met with indifference. There were attempts at being defensive like the “rich young ruler” who came up to Jesus to know what he should do to have eternal life.
Last year, the Church of England withdrew investment from Vedanta, which is involved in a mining project in Orissa. The church was dissatisfied with its respect for human rights. As ‘spiritually reborn Christians’, would we rearrange our finances?
Not just about personal finances, many people do not appreciate pulpit talks about social inequality too. “We took on personal salvation—we need our sins redeemed, and we need our Saviour,” says Rick Warren, author of the bestseller Purpose Driven Life. But “some people tended to go too individualistic, and justice and righteousness issues were overlooked.”
Can we overstate the importance of individual salvation when the reconstruction of communities is as, or even more, important? Can personal faith substitute for social conscience?
Tri Robinson says once he realised it, he no longer could separate his passion for the Kingdom of God from his commitment to care for the environment. He is the pastor of a church in the United States. “I had to tell everyone that Christians should not only care about creation but had been mandated by God to be leaders in a worldwide environmental movement. I shared this mandate with my church, I wrote a book on caring for creation (Saving God’s Green Earth)…. Together with other like-hearted people I started a ministry called ‘Let’s Tend the Garden’. … I told everyone that caring for the creation is not an option but a commission, especially for those who value and believe God’s word in his Bible.”
Do we share this conviction? As Christians, are we ready to change our practices?
The Nicodemus question still torments my heart. “How can a person be born again?”

‘When silence is betrayal’

Many Christians today define their faith by ‘religious’ symbols or catchy quotes on their cars. I have nothing against a cross or rosary hanging from the rear-view mirror or against biblical verses stuck on windshields. The other day I saw a sticker that said, “But as for me, it is good to be near Jesus” (Psalms 73:28)! A clever adaptation of verse 28 in the Psalm of Asaph, written much before Jesus’ time, which has God in place of Jesus.
Depending on one’s theological leanings, it can be seen as an overenthusiastic effort to spread the Word. Or as a naive belief that the Word will be the armour against dangers on the road. (It is rarely to remind the owner-driver to armour himself with Christian attitudes. If it were so, it would not have been on the rear windshield. In fact, it signifies a condescending attitude towards ‘people of lesser faith’.)
What I consider more sickening are in-your-face messages like ‘My boss is a Jewish carpenter’. No doubt, it is catchy and sounds impressive. But in my opinion, it displays an utter lack of sensitivity to the social and political realities in India today.
What is the actual situation in our social milieu? I, for one, with my privileged schooling, have never had a carpenter’s son as my classmate. That Jesus was himself a carpenter, who was at the lower end of the socio-economic strata, did not give the disadvantaged any better access to my Christian school for their only means of empowerment and social mobility: education.
In a lecture on ‘Inclusive Education: A View of Higher Education in India’, Professor Ganesh N. Devy says thus: “Despite achievements of half a century of affirmative action in higher education, legacies of discrimination, marginalisation and denial are still enmeshed in Indian social composition. …Successive governments have tried to cope with educational and social inequalities. All of the approximately 350 state-funded universities and16,000 colleges have been trying to provide education at a relatively low cost, not entirely unaffordable to students from the poorer classes. Yet, it cannot be said that the state has succeeded in providing access to higher education for the marginalised in India.”
Thanks to the efforts of social reformers and successive governments, opportunities have no doubt increased in higher education. Yet, the livelihoods of a mason or a carpenter without education are nothing to speak of.
A few years ago, a carpenter told me that he would never want his son to take up his profession. Getting a job, a respectable livelihood option, is as difficult as getting an education. It is also worthwhile to think if any of our youths would take up carpentry as a profession unless engineering colleges or IITs came up with a B.Tech or B.E course in it!
Herein lies the problem with simplistic statements or bold assertions like the one mentioned earlier.
But even if we were to dismiss all these as superfluous, there is another thing that should weigh more on our consciences: the deadly silence when we need to speak up. For all the alleluias and praises that we are willing to mouth, are we ready to speak up in the face of injustice in the world? What should be our reaction to the recent developments in Kerala with regard to admissions to self-financing colleges?
Years ago, Rev. Martin Luther King preached at the Riverside Church in New York City that “a time comes when silence is betrayal”.  He was condemning the Vietnam War and the unjust system that created it. He said:
“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing oriented’ society to a ‘person oriented’ society.  When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
“…And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.
“…A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
“…A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits outwith no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, ‘This is not just.’”

The image of Jesus

Of all the enduring images I have of Jesus is that of ‘the laughing Christ’.  It is not the type you normally see in paintings and pictures, which show the seriously pious or the almost sad Jesus. It shows Jesus having a hearty laugh, chin up and shoulders thrown back. I remember it as being refreshingly different when I saw it first, at the residence of our former Achen who had introduced us, as Yuvajana Sakhyam members, to a Jesus we had never known until then.
A few years earlier, a similar picture from the pages of a magazine I was thumbing through had struck me as interesting. It was a still from a movie, Matthew, based on the Gospel and produced by Visual Bible International, a South African company. “This is a Jesus who smiles, laughs and rolls up his sleeves to work and play with those he loves,” says Bruce Marchiano, who plays Jesus in the movie.
It is said that director Reghardt van den Bergh wanted Marchiano to portray Jesus as a joyful person. In his first meeting with the actor he told him, “I have one word for you: joy.” And he quoted what is said in Hebrews 1:9 about Jesus (You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy). Speaking about it later, Marchiano said that the director believed that it was joy that set apart Jesus from others.
The scene in which Peter walks on water is portrayed in such a way that when he starts sinking, Jesus laughs and embraces him. Imagine Jesus laughing with one of his best friends when he begins to sink, and telling him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”
A friend tells me that the portrait of the laughing Christ became popular in India, thanks to Rev. M.A. Thomas and the Ecumenical Christian Centre, Whitefield, Bangalore. In the 1960s, Achen chanced upon a sketch in London and bought it from a roadside vendor. It still adorns the chapel of the ECC. The ECC has reproduced the portrait and has it on sale.

The laughing Christ

It is quite likely that Jesus sprinkled his talks with humour. How else would children have come to him? (In today’s world, he would have been listed one of the most powerful public speakers, and his parables would have been a great hit on TED talks or YouTube.) One of my favourite anecdotes is about a child rolling in laughter when his father was reading him the Bible passage about “the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and paying no attention to the plank in your own eye”. If a child in our age could find humour in that, imagine all the young ones who followed Jesus in Galilee.
Jesus expressed other emotions too. Of flesh and blood, Jesus encountered many circumstances in his life that evoked in him the navarasas, or emotions that characterise life: love, laughter, fury, compassion, disgust, horror, wonder, peace, devotion.
Once he was “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” (John 11:33). Another time he “marvelled” at the centurion’s words of faith. He was seen by some as a troublemaker because he challenged the way things were done. Others saw him as a peacemaker. He loved the young man who came to ask him about the kingdom of God. But he was angry too and called the Pharisees a “brood of vipers”. He fasted, he feasted.
But just as Jesus’ humour is lost on us, so is the intention of his deeds and the reason behind these emotions.
Jesus was being no uptight conservative when he chased out money-changers from the temple with a whip in hand. I am sure he must have struggled in his mind before doing that. His anger here was as spiritual as could be. He was attacking the visible manifestations of corruption in the temple.
It is as Christ-like an emotion to act against corruption, human rights violations or environmental degradation as it is to pray.
Years ago, I struck up a conversation with a young aspirant for priesthood while on a bus journey to Kozhikode. He had been a close observer of the fishermen’s struggle in which the church had a great role to play.
“The fishermen’s struggle in Kerala was essentially a response of the traditional fishermen to the technological, economic and social changes brought about by the introduction of mechanisation of fisheries since the 1960s.” It ultimately resulted in a ban on trawling and in bringing the social security concerns of fishermen to the fore.
Playing the devil’s advocate, I asked him, “Why don’t you give the fishermen enough capital to buy mechanised boats? The church has lots of money.”
To this he replied calmly: “Christianity is not just an act of charity.”
He made me realise that the Christ with the whip is as relevant as the compassionate Christ. He made me realise that Desmond Tutu or Martin Luther King were as Christian as Mother Teresa or Father Damien.
Martin Luther King saw his civil rights activity as an extension of his ministry. He said: “The Christian gospel is a two-way road. On the one hand, it seeks to change the souls of men, and thereby unite them with God; on the other hand, it seeks to change the environmental conditions of men so the soul will have a chance after it is changed.”

Ten green commandments

Out of the mouth of babes comes great wisdom. My classmate Anjali’s little daughter had accompanied her to my office when we met after a long time. As we sat speaking, the child sat in the foyer quietly, drawing something on a piece of paper. As they stood up to leave, she gifted it to me. On it was a sketch of me, complete with a toothcomb moustache, and below it scrawled: ‘Amma’s friend.’
Even as I thanked her for the gesture, I could not but notice the paper on which she had drawn it—the unused side of a page from a notebook. To my words of appreciation, Anjali replied that the child’s teacher in her London school had taught them about caring for the environment. “They are made to realise that even pencils are from trees, and you need to be sparse in sharpening them,” she said. That was the lesson of a lifetime for me.
We hardly notice the paper drifting through our lives every day—from bus tickets to currency notes to packing material. Did you know that newly cut trees account for 55 per cent—more than half—of the total supply of paper? Can we, as individuals, take small steps to lighten the load on our planet?
If a child can, what on earth is preventing us?
A few years ago, the Church of England published a set of green commandments. It suggested many lifestyle changes such as organising a car-sharing scheme for travelling to and from Sunday worship; reviewing of any floodlighting the church has and checking whether the bulbs are energy-efficient; cancelling “wasteful” junk mail; and helping a churchyard become a 'green lung' for the community.
Recently, the CSI Synod Ecological Committee listed a 12-point action plan to be pursued by community members “to strengthen the forces of life”. The church will not use plastic cups and bags for its functions. All parishes are requested to initiate organic vegetable gardens in their premises and encourage the use of smokeless chulas and solar lamps in households and institutions.
But caring for the environment is more than all these. It also involves a more equitable distribution of resources. There is always a squeeze on the environment when the number of jobless and the poor increase. For instance, when farm prices drop, farmers in poor countries slash and burn and do all within their means to increase production. “Thus resources are plundered, rainforests denuded, rivers polluted, coastal zone regulations violated, and fisheries exhausted.”
Caring for the environment could also mean doing your bit as part of civil society in decision-making, forcing governments to honour environmental commitments, joining marginalised groups in their protests, and so on. In the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, “For the church of the 21st century, good ecology is not an optional extra but a matter of justice. It is therefore central to what it means to be a Christian.”
Here are ten steps that I have gleaned from a number of sources. These
are in the form of commandments that we must think about, and can adopt and adapt in our lives.

1. You shall have a moral obligation to look after God’s creation. That includes “the dry land called Earth, and the waters that were gathered together called Seas; plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind; swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the dome of the sky, the great sea monsters and cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind” (Genesis).

2. You shall recognise that man does not have an absolute dominion over creation. You shall not forget the interdependence of all inhabitants of the earth. You shall not destroy the trees (forests) thereof by forcing an axe against them: for you may eat of them, and you shall not cut them down (Deuteronomy 20:19). This way you will also protect the tribal people for whom living in the forests is a way of life.

3. No economic activity shall be at the cost of natural capital. For instance, the cost of safeguarding the environment shall be included in the calculations of the overall costs of any project.

4. You shall recognise the primacy of man over technology. Remember the Sabbath day. Give rest to the land (you shall not exploit it), give a break to 24x7 production.
Therefore, you shall not consume more than you ought to, take more than what is necessary from the earth beneath, or that is in the water. This way your generations shall be blessed.

5. You shall buy stuff that will last longer, and reuse in creative ways. Try and avoid air conditioners, heaters, and washers. Reduce water consumption. Say no to plastic, unless absolutely necessary. Make use of paper or cloth bags instead.

6. You shall read newspapers and magazines online; reduce printing or photocopying unncessarily. Pay bills online and encourage online bulletins and newsletters wherever possible.

7. You shall change the light bulbs in your home and church to compact fluorescent light lamps (CFLs). Besides, you shall look at the government’s Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) standards when you buy appliances. Switch off lights and electric appliances when not in use.

8. You shall conserve fuel.  Walk, or use the public transport to office at least once a week. You shall carpool as much as possible. Start with neighbours going to church together.

9. You shall plant a sapling. You shall also strive to dissuade farmers from using chemical pesticides, which kill microorganisms in the soil. Buy locally grown and organic vegetables.

10. You shall have a spiritual response to environmental questions. Create a green congregation. Make a mission statement for your church and implement it.

‘We shall overcome’

To millions of people it is the ultimate song of resistance. To me ‘We shall overcome’ is also the reminder of a mea culpa moment. I had heard it sung dozens of times earlier without ever knowing its historical significance. But this time it touched my soul, it changed my vision of seeing the world. It was a deeply moving and embarrassing experience.
As a group of non-committal adolescents, we loved attending the youth camps of the church to have a little bit of fun. We were boisterous and loud, but our words were empty. Coming from middle-class families, we went to ‘regimented English-medium schools’ that had sprung up in small towns, and vainly thought it rocking that we could belt out almost all songs of Abba or Boney M. With a beat in our hearts and a spring in our steps, we made it to every camp as a gang. We practised skits for ‘talent time’, stayed late into the night to prepare the morning ‘newspaper’, giving little thought to what was discussed during the day. Our vision was tunneled.
One day during break time at one of the students’ conferences, we retreated to the verdant surroundings of Charalkunnu with guitars in hand. Unmindful of what was happening around us, we started singing loudly. Little did we know that we were disturbing a small group of people huddled together. They were a class apart from the Syrian Christians that we were. They were attending the same camp.
As the group’s attention turned towards us, we heard a loud voice from their leader, an Achen: “Do you want to sing English songs, children?” And then he began to sing ‘We shall overcome’.
The boys and girls in the group formed a circle and sang after him. The faint voice now became bolder. This came as an assault on our sensibilities. We were sorry that we had touched a raw nerve. It was never our intention to disturb anyone and we walked away. The three little words rang in my ears for a very long time.
We shall overcome, as they say, “started out in church pews and picket lines”. Since then it has reverberated through history. The civil rights movement in the United States adopted it as its unofficial anthem. Vowing to fight for voting rights for all Americans, President Lyndon Johnson invoked the hypnotic words in his famous speech.
It has inspired civil rights and pro-democracy movements worldwide and brought about reforms in governments. It has led millions through the storm, through the night, of despair and doom. The message of hope and courage has been translated into many languages, including in Hindi (‘Hum honge kamyab’).
It was not difficult for me to discern the hurt in the voices of the boys and girls, the anger deep inside them and the sense of collective self-esteem by getting into a huddle and establishing an identity.
But, has all the “cries of pain and hymns of protests” of Dalits delivered them from centuries of oppression? Has conversion to Christianity whose bedrock is “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal.3: 28) redeemed them from social discrimination and untouchability?
Figures say there are some 19 million Dalit Christians in India. That is more than 70 per cent of the total population of Christians in the country. But their place in the church is nothing to speak of.
No doubt, caste is a political reality than just a personal reality. And it is another matter that the church has been fighting for the constitutionally guaranteed protection and privileges that Dalits lose just because they profess their faith.
But political struggles apart, don’t we need to liberate ourselves from the prejudices that have ruled us for long? African American writer James Baldwin’s essay ‘The fire next time’ explores the question of black identity. He believed the black man’s suffering was
redemptive. But he also believed that the deliverance of the whites lay in delivering themselves “from their imprisonment in myths of racial superiority”. We need to replace race with caste when we think of our own deliverance.
That is the same message that Peter got from the “great sheet let down from heaven” and made him say to Cornelius, “Get up, for I am a man as you are.” (Acts: 10).

P.S.: A cartoon I saw below one of the articles on the ‘We shall overcome’ song shows a little black boy nudging his grandfather to ask him, “Did we overcome yet?”

Letter to Santa

My dear Santa,
I know this is a bit abrupt at this time of the year when you have just begun to settle down after a long tour. Hope you enjoyed your stay in our corner of the world and stayed long enough to learn to sing 'Kuttanadan punjayile'. I can imagine you cruising along the lake and singing 'Jingle Bells...'.
Did you hear while you were here that like you, Kerala too has an annual visitor? An ideal king, Mahabali, of yesteryear. As the much celebrated song about him (Maveli naadu vanidum kaalam/manusharellaarum onnupole) says, someday at Christmas, we hope all people will "live out the true meaning of the saying that all men are created equal... Where no one will be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character... Where our nation will be lifted from the quicksand of prejudices...." Sorry, I got carried away by Martin Luther King.
Thank you for spreading cheer in trying times like these. Christmases in the past few years have reminded me of the story of the First Christmas when hundreds of children were put to the sword by Herod. The weeping in Ramah seems universal; you hear that in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, our own India, where children are the worst affected by war, tyrannical regimes, natural disasters or economic policies. I know your little gifts comfort them, give an island of respite in their world.
Why is that your bundle never grows small even after distributing all the gifts? I like to believe that you trade their worries for gifts. That is why I don't mind Santa remaining the one universal comforter. (I am against any homogenisation of culture. But maybe your acceptance comes from the fact that your ancestors date back to pre-Christian days and you contain diverse myths and cultures.) That is the miracle of Christmas.
There are times when I want to be like you. The other day, a young boy approached me on the busy Sixth Avenue of Anna Nagar, Chennai, lined with Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonald's, Hi-Style and what not, where the well-dressed turn their faces away from the poor (because they are scared to look into their eyes). He had a small bag in his hand, and wanted to sell me 'vathi petti'. I did not understand what he was saying in Tamil.
But I heard within my soul, like you do almost always, what he was trying to tell me. He wanted to pay his school fees of Rs.150. Western media translates anything like that for their readers to comprehend. It is close to 3 dollars. Well, I too walked away, partly for not wanting to dehumanise him by doling out some money (he did not ask for alms) and partly because I was a bit sceptical of him being a deceptor (I take cover under the fact that scepticism is a philosophic view).
Later, I gathered that what he was trying to sell me was a box of wicks (or incense sticks) to be used in pujas. I smiled at the irony of it. All the wicks for others to propitiate their gods! He would need a lesser offering for a lesser god! I wished I could go Santa-like to his house or change his circumstances with a magic wand.
But he is only one among the thousands in India who work hard for a living. I suggest you visit Sivakasi, Moradabad, or Kashmir, where children are employed in match and cracker factories, small industries making locks and carpet weaving units. Or any of the brick kilns in the hinterland or eateries in our towns and cities. India has the largest number of child labourers under the age of 14 in the world.
Recently I was reading about the children of Basera-e-Tabassum (meaning Abode of Smiles), a home for girls in Kupwara in militancy-ridden Jammu and Kashmir. They know more about lost childhoods than we can probably imagine. But these children got the gift of a camera, and the world got to see what they shot -- with love.
I didn't intend to sound too negative. I am optimistic. Every Christmas brings joy and hope for a better world. I appreciate your role in making the world a better place with your small gestures. I appreciate you for realising that for a child, today matters more, not tomorrow.
But I have one request. Please bring Mama Claus along when you come next. I am sure she must be helping you pack all the bags to go on your long journeys to the end of the world. At least that will help subvert the whole idea of a male benefactor. Our girls are burdened--they need to please their husbands before their marriages with fat dowries and then they have to serve them every day (cook, wash) and live their lives for them. It will be a great inspiration for our girls to see Mama join you in person in your mission to help people in need.
That will be the perfect symbol of new beginnings each Christmas bring. We, at God’s Own Country, shall be her perfect host.
See you next Christmas.
Sam

‘Please, sir, I want some more’

The term Dickensian refers to poor social and economic conditions as reflected in the novels of Charles Dickens. The Industrial Revolution had brought about major changes in 19th century England. Wealth grew, but so did poverty and hunger. Fashionable areas grew up, but so did debtors’ prisons and workhouses.
There is no striking picture of the Dickensian world than that of the half-starved Oliver Twist with his bowl saying, ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’ Strangely, this holds good in an “increasingly populous, urbanised and environmentally challenged” 21st century world.
Even as I write this, 17 children have reportedly died of malnutrition in nine months in Mumbai. It is said that 55 per cent of the city’s population live in slums side by side with some of the wealthiest people in India.
Hunger is an unwelcome guest in many more homes in India. In 2008, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which brings out the Global Hunger Index (GHI), constructed the India State Hunger Index (ISHI) after analysing hunger levels in 17 major states covering more than 95 per cent of the population.
The results were shocking: Not a single state fell in the ‘low hunger’ or ‘moderate hunger’ categories. One state—Madhya Pradesh—fell in the ‘extremely alarming’ category.
Well, that sticks out like a sore thumb in the great India story since 1991 when GDP has doubled. In the race ahead, one report says, India seems certain to miss one of its key Millennium Development Goals: halving malnutrition by 2015.
There are other ways too in which children’s lives are wrecked. Six-year-old Parthiban is the son of the watchman in our apartment. Till a few years ago, his father, who worked in a ration shop, lived in a one-room shack. But when the rent became unaffordable, he opted to moonlight as a watchman so that his wife and son will at least have a roof over their heads; Parthiban sleeps, eats and does his homework in the common area between our flats and stairwells.
But Mohammad Manan Ansari, now 15, of Samsahiriya village in Jharkhand, could not even think of that. He began working in a mica mine at the age of eight. Thanks to the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, he is at a rehabilitation centre in Jaipur to study.
India is said to have the largest number of child labourers who are under 14 in the world. The ostensible reason is always poverty, but there are other factors such as parents’ attitudes, discrimination, and social exclusion which are responsible for child labour
Last year, Ansari narrated his story at the International Labour Organisation on the day dedicated to the fight against child labour. He has a new mission in life now: to defend children’s rights.
In 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child became the first legally binding international convention to affirm human rights for children. While great progress has been made on child rights in the past 20 years, a UNICEF report says “many of the world’s children will never see the inside of a school room, and millions lack protection against violence, abuse, exploitation, discrimination and neglect”.
The most vulnerable among them are girls. In many places they don’t even get essential healthcare.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (in a novel by the same name) is the face of a young woman who learns at a very tender age that the world she lives in is a blighted one. The novel’s setting is the impoverished rural Wessex during the Long Depression. It begins with Parson Tringham informing John Durbeyfield, a peasant, that he has noble lineage. He says “Durbeyfield” is a corruption of a great family name, “D’Urberville”. To the inebriated man, the piece of information was another intoxicant. (All of us, Saint Thomas Christians, will understand easily how heady lineage can be!)
Now it comes on the shoulders of Tess, 14, his eldest daughter, to take the goods loaded in a cart to the market the next day. Little Abraham, her brother, accompanies her.
The sun had not yet risen when the children set out on their journey, Abraham still groggy. …As he began to wake up slowly, Abraham, as little children would, got fascinated with silhouettes made against the sky by trees and clouds, “began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing from a lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head”.
Suddenly, he stopped to ask his sister:
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
There is another story from long ago, when a young woman and her husband, looking for a place to rest, knocked at the doors of several inns. They had no money, and were exhausted and cold, and she was pregnant. Later that day, she gave birth to a baby boy in a manger.
Time had some more bad surprises in store for the family. The parents had to flee to another country to escape the wrath of the king.
There are many reasons why people choose to migrate, including poverty, armed conflict, social strife, political turmoil and economic hardships. All such migration destroys human dignity, worst of all of children.
It is our collective responsibility to ensure every child’s rights to survival, development, protection and participation. In Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral’s words: “We are guilty of many errors and many faults but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow.’
“His name is ‘Today.’”

Figures of speech

Rightly or wrongly, I had little patience for people who called me a ‘brother in Christ’ until I met Immanuel. I won’t say that I have fully grasped its meaning, but that was the day I wised up to such an expression.
My work had once taken me to a football club, which offered free coaching to young boys in an urban slum in Chennai. Some of them moved on to professional clubs every year. That encouraged dozens of boys to come every day to the football ground in a crummy corner of the city to practise shooting, heading, passing the ball or goalkeeping.
It was impossible to be run down by the stench from the nearby dumpyard that hung in the air like smog on a windless day. It was as much a symbol of the everyday reality of the boys who lived in one-room tenements just across the dumpyard as it was of urban decay. Most of the boys were Dalits and from extremely poor backgrounds. The club gave them reasons to dream.
Immanuel was the honorary treasurer of that club. He was my translator, my guide. Every morning, Immanuel, who must be in his early thirties, joined the boys. He was passionate about the game. And he arranged the refreshments that the club provided the boys.
Immanuel said the club had a loftier aim too; infusing discipline and encouraging the boys to study. In a decade of the club’s functioning, he said, there were fewer school dropouts. Just about 5 per cent of the people who lived there have had an education beyond Class X.
As we warmed up after a couple of meetings and telephone conversations, he told me he was the local pastor of a church, an international Christian denomination. (Though at the ground, the only religion was football.) One day during conversation he said, “So, we are brothers in Christ.”
Brothers? That meant we had a common father. ‘Our’ father.
Our father in heaven....
Is that not how Jesus asked us to pray?
In Theology of a Classless Society, Metropolitan Geevarghese Mar Osthathios says how the second person singular (YOU) is used in the Lord’s Prayer to refer to only God. The rest of it is in first person plural, that is, ‘WE’ or ‘US’. Thus, the prayer teaches us to ask “provision [of resources], pardon, and protection and preservation for the whole of humanity”.
Jesus, no doubt, had a way with words. He used many figures of speech, like the simile and the metaphor, to make a point. For instance, when he said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field”, he was drawing people’s attention to the similarity between a hidden treasure and the kingdom, both of which are valuable.
There is a marked difference between ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘kingdom in heaven’. So, what do we make of ‘let your kingdom come’ in the Lord’s Prayer?
In the words of N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham: “‘God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven . . . give us this day our daily bread.’ You cannot pray this correctly unless you are mentally putting your arms around people in Afghanistan who are literally eating grass as we speak….”
That makes it imperative to put my arms mentally around all the 925 million people, whom the UN estimates will suffer from chronic hunger in the world this year. Or the child dying every six seconds because of undernourishment related problems.
That makes it necessary for me, as Mahatma Gandhi told us, “to recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to Swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?”
Would Gandhi have allowed such a thing as grain rotting in godowns when millions went hungry? Would he have agreed to a 10-day, Rs.20,000 crore plus extravaganza for the Commonwealth Games when, according to some reports, 250,000 people were rendered homeless because of it?
“Every single bit of the Lord’s Prayer is radical because every single bit of it challenges our assumptions about who we are and who God is and what the world is like,” says Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. “And what it’s praying for… is the most revolutionary change you can imagine in the world we live in. A change to a situation where what God wants can happen, to a situation where all the hungry are fed, to a situation where forgiveness is the first imperative in all our relationships.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/prayer/lordsprayer_1.shtml)
The challenge for you and me is to live the prayer. In other words, the prayer becomes meaningful when all our brothers are fed, clothed and have a roof over their heads.
I mailed Immanuel the other day, but I am yet to hear from him. I need to find the courage to pray ‘Our Father’.