To Happy Endings and Never Endings

By Debarupa Biswas, FHI Kolkata 

The story of human intimacy is to constantly allow ourselves to see the people around us in a new, more fractured light. I always grew up with the idea of loving pain. Or being accustomed to pain, that is. A few of my favourite novelists always had me convinced that it was all real. I never hunted for answers, I simply believed. My decision to join FHI was mostly an afterthought to cope with this depression which, I believed would soothe my mind and work as a therapy and help me in believing that amidst all the chaos, there is a world that can bring people together. A world that can uplift individuals by making people realise that we are all in this together.

I’ve interacted with a lot of street and destitute children in the last few months, but nothing would’ve prepared me for my first experience as a volunteer in FHI.

There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our attention: victims of hunger, of racism, and political persecution, children being forced to absorb the oppression that the society has compelled them to look forward to, writers and poets, prisoners in so many lands governed by the Left and by the Right. Human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free.

There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person, one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one child is hungry or is filled with pain, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.