Unit 2: Children At Work

Velu was initially a very naive boy who ran away from his village to avoid the torture of his drunkard father. However, when he arrived in a big city, Chennai, he felt lost and miserable among so many people. Soon he met Jaya, a rack-picker who helped him get food as she realised he was starving. From then on, Velu acted smartly by following her as he didn’t know where to go or what to do in such a big city. On his way, he read the Central Jail hoarding written in Tamil and Jaya warned him that he should not do anything stupid and should avoid getting caught by the policemen. He kept following her until she took him to the slum area, where he saw the strange huts made of metal sheets, tyres, bricks, wood and plastic. They stood crookedly and looked as if they would fall any moment. Soon Jaya told him how she and other children collected glass, paper and other stuff and hand it over to Jam Bazaar Jaggu, who further sold them to a factory nearby. Seeing all this, Velu agrees to work as a rag-picker like Jaya for the time being until he finds a suitable job for himself.

Yes, Jaya was a brave and sensitive child with a good sense of humour. She was of the same age as Velu and worked as a rag-picker, and knew well how to survive in the city. She knew all the roads across the city and knew where she could find food to eat. However, when she met Velu at the railway station, she roamed about the city with him by collecting glass, paper and bottles and also got him some food to eat from a garbage bin behind a wedding hall. She tried to help him in all possible ways and told him to join her in rag-picking work. She gave him a pair of old shoes without laces and pushed a sack and a stick into his hands. However, we also notice that she has a humorous nature when she asks Velu if he has come to Chennai to become a rich person. She also helps him to cross the busy streets and told him that if he continued to stand still in the middle of the road like that, he would get run over by the huge vehicles unnecessarily.

The story “Children at work” depicts the sad plight of slum dwellers, mostly the children who have to work as rag-pickers to sustain and feed themselves in big cities. It shows how the rubbish that we throw away in the garbage is being collected by these children to make a livelihood for themselves. People throw away leftover food, bottles and paper, which are collected by these children, and they earn money by selling these to nearby factories. As a matter of fact, waste thrown away by someone becomes a blessing or a source of income for another. Therefore, difficult circumstances compel such children to work as ragpickers, and they earn a living from it.

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