The Scorned Ones.

I recently heard a piece of news that shocked me just as much as it disgusted me. The news was that 8 primary school children were thrown out of a school because they had AIDS. Yes, that’s exactly what happened. It does not matter where it happened, the shameful thing is that it did and it happened in India.This is the news story.

Apparently this happened because the parents of the rest of the students in the school realized that these kids were HIV+ and demanded that they be removed from the school immediately. Obviously, this paranoia was due to a misplaced sense of fear of their own children contracting the ‘dreaded disease’. How illiterate are people or maybe misinformed that would get them up in arms against innocent kids that do not even know what all the noise and clamour is about.  The end result – the children were expelled from the school for no fault of their own.

Image Courtesy: Google Images.

Well, this all was just the horrible part; the really disgusting part comes now. Not only did the parents demand that the these children be expelled, but they even made their own children, some of whom might’ve been those particular children’s friends, sit outside the school premises with cardboard banners demanding the expulsion of their schoolmates.

How unbelievably naïve are these people that they choose to do this to their children?

How could they spread the hatred of a fellow human in distress to their children?

How could they inculcate such a mindset that will ultimately set them on the wrong path?

Maybe these parents have a twisted notion of them being right by demanding that a child with AIDS not come in contact with their kids, for their own safety; but why teach them to hate people inflicted by something they have no control over?

The news channel was playing a video footage of the children doing what they were told to do and it was immensely sad for me to watch those kids being led down a road that is averse to the modern times we live in and that they will probably be scarred by this incident if and when they realize what was done using their innocent hands. But what is more disturbing is that they had no idea what was happening.

Is this the narrow minded way in which India claims to be progressing today? There are tall claims of literacy being given emphasis on but when one reads of incidents such as teachers beating kids half to death or kids being fed poisoned food or girls being harassed by their principals or kids being thrown out for being different, I ask:

IS THIS EDUCATION?

Fellow blogger Suchita Goel  has written a poem, “Apathy and the Spectator”on a person infected with AIDS. It is very touching and I thought it should be part of this post so that people realize the state of the scorned and the abhorred ones.