SADAK CHHAP

Nawaz and Jackie Chen, whom we followed when they went rag-picking on Malabar Hill in Mumbai, belong to an organisation called Sadak Chhap, literally "Stamp of the Street" in Hindi. ,Sadak Chhap is an organization of several thousand street kids in Bombay and other Indian cities, closely allied with Mahila Milan, the pavement dwellers organisation in Byculla district. Sadak Chhap is run and organised by Jockin and Celine d'Cruz, both of whom we've met before on Apna Street.

Celine d'Cruz started working with the ladies of Mahila Milan straight out of university, back in the mid-1980s, when incidentally Julian first stumbled upon them. Jockin was already working in the slums - one of the few men who has been there from the start. Small, always overworked, with a command of the English language that theoretically does not work, should not work, but which everyone understands because of the idiosyncratic "body English" that accompanies it, Jockin's lifetime of working for slum dwellers and street kids worldwide was recognised a few years ago with Asia's equivalent of the Nobel prize for Social Work - the Magsaysay award.

Both Jockin and Celine have very definite and distinct philosophies about who street kids are and what should be done to help them, opinions that may shock, but which are seen to have worked. They are always on the go, but after several years, Julian got them together and out-of-reach of the telephone.

It's six in the evening in the Night Shelter under a footbridge that links busy Queen's Road to the Wankhede Cricket stadium the other side of the commuter rail lines into nearby Churchgate station. Malgaura, Gopi and thirty or forty of the street kids are here to make music. Jokin and Celine have just dropped in. Jokin's in a nostalgic mood. Thirty years ago, almost to the day, he was doing the exact same thing himself.

"I was with ten to fifteen boys, all of them age between ten to fifteen, and I'm a bit older - above eighteen. We picked up these small, throwaway oil boxes, dabba we call them, and started singing songs, film songs."

Jokin had just arrived here from his native Bangalore. He'd settled in Janta Colony on the northern outskirts of the city, over towards Thane Creek. It doesn't exist now. It was bulldozed off the map to make way for the Homi Baba Nuclear Research Institute. That's still remembered as an infamous story in the struggle of slum dwellers.

Anyway, it was a Friday afternoon in October 1964. And Jokin and a bunch of kids started spontaneously combusting to film songs, just like Malgaura, Gopi and the rest are doing this evening, thirty years on.

"....When you start singing, we found there were about thirty, twenty five to thirty audience. All the kids seven year, ten year, all then..you continue to sing. So, it started around 4.30 in the evening. It went up to 7 ...

And the kids must have enjoyed it. Because the next day it all repeated itself. Same time, same place. But this time, twice as many kids."...the third day, it was Sunday, I still remember we started off around 10.30 in the morning. The program went up to 2 o'clock. Full gathering - children, babies, little school-going, then adult, the women. It's like a compound and it's all..crowd control, everything was done voluntarily by all those who are looking-on. We are not doing anything!

Even at the tender age of eighteen, Jockin's talent was really for organising, for bringing people together. He certainly couldn't sing to save his life, or earn his supper!

"But I found the people, those who can sing, and those who can play these drums..so that is the beginning. And within a week's time of this music converted into night school - coaching class. Then it became a regular school . We started working, getting into development and so on, so forth. So I have this easy way of communicating to the children!"

And it was the same way everywhere else he's lived and worked - Delhi, Bangalore, Pondicherry, Madras, Bangladesh..even with my own children. Jockin has it, whatever it is. But it wasn't really until Mahila Milan had been formed and Jockin had come on board with the National Slum Dwellers Federation, in the mid Eighties, that he started thinking seriously about organising the street kids. UNICEF asked SPARC/Mahila Milan and NSDF to do a survey of Street Children. Jockin got Celine involved. They both agreed that any organisation should be for the street kids and by the street kids.

To my ears, this sounds a lot like the basic philosophy behind Mahila Milan - letting them decide the shape and the form of (what is after all) their organisation! Jockin agrees:

"Yes, you go to the street children, where they are....make them say what they want. Give them the technical support they need and let them get on with running their own lives."

Sounds eminently sensible. But it hides a real kicker. If most of us were asked to devise a program to help street kids, what would our goals be? Get them back into school. Teach them some skill so they can earn a living, and develop some self-esteem. And try and reunite them with their families.

Jokin says those are great ideas. But they contain one major flaw. They all unconsciously assume that we can and should make that street child over into our own image and idea of what a street kid should be, what goals he should aim for, his vision of the "better" future. In other words, liberal social workers invariably try to make street kids in their own image. They try to give them middle-class values. And it simply doesn't work. Jokin says "it's perhaps the Original Sin in all development work."

"..when we started off - street children - we said 'We don't know what to do. But we know what we should not do.' All the things we shouldn't, we know very clearly: like not to have a regular house, not to have attendance, not to ask them to clean, not to have them bath - all those things which we said... the children will not like, don't like according to our understanding... "All what they should not do we know!"

Not taking a bath, not being clean is very hard for us middle-class adults to accept. This is what we feel to be important.

But the street kid can turn round and say to you or me: "I don't feel, I don't feel anything like this. You feel for yourself. Where is the question of me? How can you tell me what I should do?"

Imagine for a moment: You're a social worker, committed to helping street children. You meet a dirty, tired, hungry boy, obviously in distress. What's the first thing you'd do? Give him something to eat and then ask him: "Where's your father? How did you get here? Where did you come from?" Government and the welfare organisations then add their two cents worth: "Why don't you send them home? Why doesn't he have a house? Why can't he go and stay in a hostel? Why can't he go and stay in a hostel" Obviously, there's a huge difference between how we look at the poor, and how the poor see themselves.

Celine D'Cruz has all this time been sitting quietly listening to the boys make music. She looks up. Have you ever read "The Little Prince?" by Saint-Exupery? There's a bit in it where the Prince says "Why do adults always ask me what my father does? ...And I think those are the kind of questions elite intellectuals worry about. "what is your family background?" "And don't you want to go back home to your mother?" And "Oh, they must be waiting for you." and "Oh, your mother must be crying for you."

In fact, it's often the opposite. And it happens everywhere, and all the time. Take Gopi, a boy that both of us know. Celine continues: "That mother must have been very happy the day that child left, simply because she was not able to give him the next meal. Like Gopi, his parents just left him at Igatpuri railway station. And he says "I saw the train go with my parents in it, and I couldn't run after that train. So they just left me."

Try to understand them on their own terms and help them accordingly. Then, maybe, and it's always a big maybe, something lasting might result. In the case of street kids that also means often remembering one other basic reality. (though not in the case of little Gopi) These are children who took a conscious decision to leave home, however unlikely this appears to us. Jockin says you have to start by respecting that:

"Now they will make a decision how to live: the decision which nobody can make..so they are the best decision-maker. You have to provide them a chance to decide about it, because you have to understand them, that they know how to make decisions!"

The other great liberal, middle-class "myth" is that we should help and equip the child to fit back into society. Social work as rehabilitation, where the ideal model is how we conceive of society.

Celine is adamant that this is something they strongly oppose, arguing that the street kid'slifestyle may be the best for him with regards to his own survival. I think this is something we may be able to endorse in the abstract. In the reality it's a lot harder. As Celine adds, there are so many good and generous misconceptions on our part:

We never really respect the child for what he is already doing now. Most of these children are at the bottom of the recycling industry, picking up scraps from street corners, from lanes. And I don't understand why we can't treat that as being an important job? Why is it that it is looked upon as something that needs to be changed?"

In Jockin's mind "Tolerant" doesn't mean "Anything goes", turning a blind eye to delinquent behavior. The Street Kids also have their own code of basic morality - stealing or drugs are simply not tolerated. Fine.

So far, so good. It's the next bit I've always had a hard time understanding: Jokin himself treats them pretty firmly, sometimes in ways that make even me wince. I've seen him give kids a good thrashing with his belt. Or hang them up by their shirt from a nail on the wall.

When I pressed him, he explained that this was part of his broader philosophy...

Treat the Street Kid with some basic human dignity.Firmness or "Tough love": yes. To show the limits of what he - Jockin - will tolerate. But respecting human dignity? Either I still don't understand, or I simply cannot agree.

But I do agree that the best people to help them are the pavement dwellers. Because they share a similar culture and experience. And they're not the enemy. They're the next step up on the ladder. It was starting when I was living in Byculla back in the early 1990s: Some Sadak Chhapsstart helping pavement dwellers in their business. They get in the habit of, maybe, eating with the family. Then sharing their huts. And pretty soon, when they've got a steady income of their own, they settle down to a hut of their own. One Sadak Chhap on P D'Melo Road's had just got married to the daughter of a pavement family and gone to live with them. Now, many of the kids I knew and roamed the city with are married, with kids.
Jockin says it's the easiest form of development work imaginable. Just be with them and let them be themselves and let them help themselves. One day, the Night Shelter here at Churchgate will be run entirely by former alumni. No development workers in sight! It's quite a thought!

The jam session's almost over. Gopi launches into the final song, about how a street kid once caught by the Remand Home Police is like a fly caught in hot oil. Doomed to thrash about, and never to escape.

Jockin says it's the easiest form of development work imaginable. Just be with them and let them be themselves and let them help themselves. One day, the Night Shelter here at Churchgate will be run entirely by former alumni. No development workers in sight! It's quite a thought!

The jam session's almost over. Gopi launches into the final song, about how a street kid once caught by the Remand Home Police is like a fly caught in hot oil. Doomed to thrash about, and never to escape.

Essay
Episodes 1 - 4
Episodes 5 - 8
Episodes 9 - 12
Episodes 13 - 16
Episodes 17 - 20
Episodes 21 - 24
Episodes 25 - 28
Episodes 29 - 32
Episodes 33 - 35

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