Nadim Siraj has this inspiring story of a gritty girl who is working towards making a difference in the lives of urban India’s street childrenIt’s often said that most life-changing, thought-provoking ideas emerge out of inner contradictions. In the quiet corridors and backrooms of Mumbai’s famed Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), there’s a young research officer who is going through such a life-changing phase — and in her fledgling career in the field of social sciences, 26-year-old Shaoni Shabnam has already sent out a screaming message.An academic genius, an ardent sociology student, an IITian, and a topper in sociology Masters from Pune University, Shaoni is rabidly passionate about a field that she’s dabbled with in the course of academics, and has turned it into an integral part of her life and her philosophy — the plight of street children in urban India.Like any other stream, sociology, too, sees a beeline of students in our country. However, what sets the Kolkata-born girl apart is the way in which the issues of underprivileged street children and slum-dwellers in urban India have instilled a whole new zeal into her — to someday make it all count.These days Shaoni is a busy research officer at the plush TISS centre in Mumbai. But amid poring into statistics and going through the rigours of data analyses in the field of labour market research, she always finds time out to recall the days when she went about those life-threatening field visits.“It was in the summer of 2007 when I came down to Kolkata for a detailed outdoor research on the city’s street children,” recounts Shaoni, when she visited her hometown for her dissertation as part of her MPhil course from IIT, Bombay. “I had come down for two months. I visited the jhopar-patties along the Ganga in Babughat. And that experience changed me. For the first time I got a real hang of how helpless the country’s urban street children are. It’s horrifying. And those sights and memories have become a part of me ever since,” she said.Incidentally, Shaoni is the daughter of noted city educationist Miratun Nahar. And the latter’s influence has played a key role in her life in probing into matters and issues of social relevance.Taking a cue from her mother, Shaoni’s experiment back in April 2007 was like an acid test. Accompanied by enthusiasts from a city-based NGO, the otherwise reticent Shaoni went about visiting the Babughat slums down the Ganga and discovered how pathetic the situation is for the children there. “They are such potential kids in those slums. It’s just that they don’t have the privileges of a socially better-off life that we get. My interaction with some of the slum kids almost brought tears into my eyes. There was this particular instance when a bunch of those kids sang a patriotic song for us as we visited them in their ramshackle ‘homes’. They were so thrilled and excited — I was just blown away,” she said.“At the end of the day, our society is such that there’s just no one to take care of those children. Yes, there is the odd NGO here and there. But they help them only to a point. In fact, the NGO initiatives are invariably never continuous and the average urban streetkid is left stranded somehow,” she laments.The Babughat experience apart, Shaoni had earlier undertaken a group visit to Pabal, a village in the interiors of Pune district, to study the non-formal education system introduced by an NGO working in the area.It’s not been very long that Shaoni has been working as research officer in labour studies. But she’s already made up her mind that she will someday make her experience count. Apart from her passion for lending a helping hand to urban India’s street children, she also takes a keen interest in issues like degeneration in the wake of globalisation and is an avid critic of India’s media coverage on matters of social significance. No wonder, she’s decided to get back to pursuing further studies — she’s now eyeing a PhD in media and cultural studies — only to prepare herself better to someday make it count.
