A Pinching Game

At times pictures make us stop and reflect, and hence it is an experience to watch poignant photographs. I was checking this article on Rediff about Mukesh Parpiani’s photographs. The article features many thoughtful pictures, though most of those are of celebrities and I could not get why. After a while I reached a place where I saw the below photograph with caption: 

As it says, this poor woman pinched her child (perhaps her own child) to make it cry, in order to gain PM Indira Gandhi’s attention. What was this woman thinking?

Indira ji was certainly not carrying a big purse with loads of money which she could give to these women. Or is it that the woman hoped she would become emotional seeing a child cry and announce a large sum of compensation for these people? Since these were riot-victims, of course Indira ji would have seen them in bad condition, she would also have seen some child really injured or really crying. What was the need for this woman to make her own child suffer? I think, most probably, the woman was uneducated and did not think much before doing it. She just used a common “trick” which she would have used at other places as well. I mean, I do not think she would have pinched the child first time or only time here in front of the PM. She did not necessarily “plan” it or expected anything serious “in return”. Perhaps her hands just did what they were programmed to do in such situations. And it is so sad to imagine.

Unfortunately, I was able to recall an incident after seeing above picture. When my daughter had come to my place after about 2 years, there was a boy who was with my in-law’s, working as a house help. He used to carry the baby in his arms most of the time. One evening, when I asked him to hand over the baby daughter to me, he tried to hand her over to me and before doing it, he pinched her and she suddenly cried. I scolded him about why did he do that and he denied doing it. But I had noticed that my daughter had cried even while she was in his arms and before she touched mine, and hence I had no doubts that he had pinched her. I scolded and warned the boy to never do that again. How could the boy who took care of her for two years be so cruel that he would pinch her to make her cry and hence not go into the arms of her father? Are all feelings, ethics, morality and sensibility limited to educated and rich people and do these people from lower section of society have no heart at all? I would not like to believe that. But the incident did prove to me that utter cruelty exists in this world and if people can pinch babies to make them cry in order to gain some petty political advantage, they could do worse things someday.

Such episodes disturb us and we may feel like losing hope in humanity. But these are also reminders that life is not only roses but also about thorns, and how much lucky we were to have safe and abuse-free childhood.

- Rahul Tiwary