On the way to School

For this Ramadan, I had decided that each week I would go out for a late night movie. The first week I had watched How old are you?, that was with my wife and kids. Last weekend I watched Bangalore Days. This weekend I waited for the movies to change, but alas, it seems that owing to their huge popularity, last week’s movies would continue this week too. In hindi, there was Humpty Sharma ki dulhaniya, but I was not too keen on that.

This weekend, after a sumptuous Iftar Party hosted by my college alumni, I was back at home, watching a late night Bhojpuri movie on DD Bihar. A movie, in which an off duty soldier takes some sort of revenge on his paternal uncle, that’s when it struck me, that last year same time around I had watched another soldier movie, The bridge over the river kwai, a 1957, Word War II classic at the Museum of Islamic Arts theater.

I quickly lunged on to my phone to check out the DFI (Doha Film Institute) app, to see what they are screening right now. They normally screen some awesome movies, some of which are even free of charge or charged as low as QR.1! The app showed two screenings, one was Amazonia, the movie about a capuchin monkey, born in captivity and now lost in the Amazon forest after a plane crash, and the other, On the way to School, a movie about four kids from different parts of the world who overcome dangerous obstacles and long journeys to attend school. Very soon, and to my dismay, I found out that, these screenings were scheduled for 10^th and 12^th July, respectively, that is last week. “Shucks!” I said, “Another case of slow updating of the app”. Frankly, I would have rather skipped the losers’ final at football world cup and watched On the way to School. But Alas!

In the moments that followed, I was on google researching about On the way to School. Frankly, I could not find much, except that there is another Turkish movie by the same name, and that, the one I was looking for is probably made in French, so now I have to find a print with English subtitles. Anyways my research had to be abandoned half way as torrent is blocked in Qatar and I would have to wait until the weekday to access it through my corporate account at work. (Now you know what I do at work! ;-P ) I could wait, but not enough, I found the movie trailer on YouTube.

Sometimes, watching the trailer is enough. It tells you whether the movie is worth or not the trouble, and this one is definitely worth it. Definitely worth taking the torrent risk!

The movie is about Jackson, Zahira, Samuel and Carlito, four children who live in four corners of the globe, that is, Kenya, Morocco, India and Argentina respectively, and all share the same desire to learn. They have understood that only education will allow them to improve their lives, and it is for this reason that, each day, they set out on highly risky journeys, through extraordinary landscapes, on their quest for knowledge. The film observes as these kids, barely 10 to 12 years in age, along with their siblings, overcome often-dangerous obstacles and enormous distances over treacherous landscapes, wild animals and even bandits on their journey to the classroom.

Here’s the link: http://youtu.be/eIsQ0B43Q9Y

Just reading about their lives, and watching a mere 90 minute clip, I was reminded of my parents and their usual rant about going to school. Their stories about they used to walk long distances to reach to the only school in the vicinity, how they struggled with their midday meal, how they suffered for they didn’t have the right books and all the blah blah. I was also pushed to think how fortunate I was. I had a proper school, a proper school bus picking and dropping me back every day, and what a fuss we kids made about it, and how fortunate my kids are, they have air-conditioned busses plying them from their doorstep to their air-conditioned classrooms, digital screens in the classes, a library, gym, swimming pool, playgrounds, canteen and what not. They have lots more than I had and I had lots more than what my parents had. Things have really improved with time, I thought.

That night, I was about to retire for the day, and as the last task logged in to my Facebook page to check for any last updates, and there it was; a close friend had posted the news of a 6 year old girl raped by two gym instructors in an international school. With that, my whole night was spoilt.

The next day, that is today, as soon as I woke up, I was on the internet trying to find out what the incident was all about. The news was all over TV. I found out that this incident had happened on 2^nd July, and despite the parents of the child having lodged a complaint on 15^th, and despite the fact that yesterday the Police Chief was in the school to talk to the protesting parents, no arrest has yet been made. Absurd! Absurd that the school failed to own up and act against the teacher who locked this little kid in a room under the pretext that she was a badly behaved child. Absurd that the school failed to own up and hand over the perpetrators to police.

Absurd and funny, especially in the light of the fact that few months back a leading journalist had molested a female colleague in lift in Goa, and despite the girl having not registered a police complaint, the molester was arrested and lodged in jail. In the aftermath, the Managing Editor of a prominent magazine had to resign from her position. The police was fast, just because some political parties had the will to push them into it.

Whilst the perpetrators of this heinous crime against a hapless 6 yr old roam freely, the school says, they are not responsible, the parents have to go on protesting for days long, they have to carry out a rally through the city, and all this time we are waiting. Waiting for the school to own it up, waiting for the law enforcement to act. All this while a little girl has to go through two medical tests and explain things to the police and other officials as if she is the culprit. Shame!

I wonder what is going on in the heads of all those school kids right now. What they think about their school? Like Jackson, Zahira, Samuel and Carlito, do they believe that School is a place where they need to go to change their life for a better, or is school a scary place that their parents send them to every day so that they behave well on the weekends, or is it some shit place that they just have to go to.

Pushes me to think, are we really fortunate to have all these facilities, these big buildings, playgrounds, libraries, these vast facilities run by emotionless morons?

Shame! Shame on our political system, shame on our law enforcement. Shame on those parents that brought up those criminals. Shame on the school that recruited them. Shame on our society that does not have a filter mechanism to drain out these kinds of people from our system. Shame!