Name: Armugam
Age: 19
Education: A school dropout. Quit school in the seventh grade.
Dream: I have none. I have no idea of what you call a “feature”. All I know is that I need to go to work every day. I can only stretch my desires such that I want to motivate all the children in this area not to give up their studies. I did not have any interest in going to school. I know I cannot teach them at the AC3 Centre, but I can surely encourage each child to not go stray and ruin their lives.
Occupation: A machine operator at a shoe factory
Talent: I have the capacity to learn photography. I love taking pictures. The photo exhibition was a way to show to the world that there are people who live in the slums. I have tried to capture the pictures of my world. Today people in the slum call me to take photographs of local weddings and functions. I feel encouraged by the warmth of people out here.
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A few technology savvy volunteers from the Association for India’s Development who also believe in the Free Software Movement transformed a dingy room in the slum area of Sudarshan Layout as their tuition centre. If you stand outside this tiny, often dark room, you know that it stands on the fringes of large IT corporations and plush marbled floor apartments that overlook the slum. When you walk through the lanes of the slum, you evidently know that this is a world on the other side of the divide: the urban-poor divide, the digital divide, the caste divide, the gender divide, the physically challenged divide, the un-equitable public health and education divide.
Through the Eyes of a Child
The homes of Armugam, Asha, Mani, Saraswathi, Nadiya and many such children are built on small narrow lanes, next to open drains. Most of the children are born into households of the lowest caste, the crushed, the marginalized, where their parents are manual scavengers, road sweepers, unorganized workers, migrant workers, and manual labourers. The children born here are children like any other. They dream. They play. They sing. They think: they know that life is not about equal opportunities, equal access to knowledge, and equal rights.
Whose Development, Anyway?
Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley may have well made it to the map of the world as “THE” IT hub standing right next to San Francisco. Sure, it is development. But whose, anyway? It is easy to assume that a flourishing IT sector trickles down to the rest of the people. Bangalore symbolises Karnataka and Karnataka reflects Bangalore. Karnataka is considered one of the poor states where the disparity between the urban and village population is stark. It is estimated that there are over 1000 slums in Bangalore today, housing a fourth of the city’s population and occupying only 2.5 to 3% of the total BBMP land of 800 sq.km. If one thought that computers was the key to development alone, that one needs to realize that India’s 60 million children do not go to/or have no access to school at all.
Information-Digital Poverty
Today’s twenty-first century may clearly be the age of information and communication technology. They are at the same time potential instruments for addressing the fundamental chasms of the digital, information divide. This digital divide exacerbates the glaring inequalities often making the technology itself unusable. We wanted to break that. We wanted the children to express their world breaking the fear psychosis of technology. The children were given cameras in their hands, taught basic photography and lo and behold, in a few month’s time, we have seen their worlds being captured in its most beautiful yet stark contrast, innocent yet riddled with hard experience, bleak sometimes but hopeful mostly. These are photographs that tell a tale of every girl and boy who dream with the same refrain anywhere in the world – that “the pursuit to happiness is mine alone and I have a right to it!”
The photographs catch a child in a limbo of the now and the tomorrow. Today Armugam knows that he has found his medium of expression. He knows that he will be able to explore the art of photography and expression, which probably a classroom may well have not given him.
Note: Armugam is the boy in the yellow T-shirt.
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