You are the social worker from Child Preventive Abuse, New Delhi. You happen to visit and interact with the families of the bangle-makers in Firozabad and feel grieved on seeing the children working in glass blowing industry. You decide to write a letter to the Editor of the Hindustan Times to save them from being exploited. Write the letter.

How is Mukesh’s attitude to his situation different from that of his family?

What could be some of the reasons for the migration of people from villages to cities?

Would you agree that promises made to the poor children are rarely kept? Why do you think this happens in the incidents narrated in the text?

What forces conspire to keep the workers in bangle industry of Firozabad in poverty?

Or

What forces conspire to keep in poverty the workers in the bangle industry of Firozabad?

How, in your opinion, can Mukesh realise his dream?

Mention the hazards of working in the glass bangles industry.

Why should child labour be eliminated and how?

Although this text speaks of factual events an situation of misery it transforms these situations with an almost poetical prose into a literary experience. How does it do so? Here are some literary devices:

• Hyperbole is a way of speaking or writing that makes something sound better or more exciting than it really is. For example: Garbage to them is gold.

• Metaphor as you may know, compares two things or ideas that are not very similar. A metaphor describes a thing in terms of a single quality or feature of some other things; we can say that a metaphor transfers a quality of one thing to another.

For example: The road was a ribbon of light.

• Simile is a word or phrase that compares one thing with another using the words “like” or “as”. For example: As white as snow.

Carefully read the following phrases and sentences taken from the text and name the figures of speech used.

1. Saheb-e-Alam which means the lord of the universe is directly in contrast to what Saheb is in reality.

2. Drowned in an air on desolation.

3. Seemapuri, a place on the periphery of Delhi yet miles away from it, metaphorically.

4. For the children it is wrapped in wonder; for the elders it is a means of survival.

5. As her hands move mechanically like the tongs of a machine, I wonder if she knows the sanctity of the bangles she helps make.

6. She still has bangles on her wrist, but not light in her eyes.

7. Few airplanes fly over Firozabad.

8. Web of poverty.

9. Scrounging for gold.

10. And survival in Seemapuri means rag-picking. Through the years, it has acquired the proportions of a fine art.

11. The steel canister seems heavier than the plastic bag he would carry so lightly over his shoulders.

The beauty of the glass bangles of Firozabad contrasts with the misery of people who produce them.

This paradox is also found in some other situations, for example those who work in gold and diamond mines, carpet weaving factories and the products of their labour, construction workers and the buildings they build.

• Look around and find examples of such paradoxes.

• Write a paragraph of about 200 to 250 words on any one of them. You can start by making notes.

Here is an example of how one such paragraph may begin:

You never see the poor in this town. By day they toil, working cranes and earthmovers, squirreling deep into the hot sand to lay the foundations of chrome. By night they are banished to bleak labour camps at the outskirts of the city.

What does Anees Jung want to reveal in her story ‘Lost Spring’ Stories of Stolen Childhood?