In a country where half the population of 1.25 billion people are under 25 years of age, celebrating children is hardly surprising.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s love for children is well known and hence we celebrate the day on his birthday.
Considered to be a ‘beloved’ of all children, “Chacha Nehru†always felt that children were like the buds in a garden and must be lovingly nurtured.
Schools and educational institutions all over India mark the occasion as a grand fiesta. Schools are not closed on this day. Moreover, children attend school not to study but to get involved in numerous activities and events awaiting them out there.
The young are sure to enjoy their teachers doing a role reversal, pleasing kids with different cultural programs and events.
Nehru once said, “Grown-ups have a strange way of putting themselves in compartments and groups. They build barriers… of religion, caste, colour, party, nation, province, language, and customs and of rich and poor. Fortunately, children do not know much about these barriers, which separate. They play and work with each other and it is only when they grow up that they begin to learn about these barriers from their elders.”
The Day is all about respecting and honouring children. Now, when our country is facing terrible and disturbing attacks on kids, still dealing with child labour and homelessness, we must take action and ensure that the nation’s future is secured with happy intelligent minds.
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Nehru’s Legacy
The importance of Jawaharlal Nehru in the context of Indian history can be distilled to the following points: he imparted modern values and thought, stressed secularism, insisted upon the basic unity of India, and, in the face of ethnic and religious diversity, carried India into the modern age of scientific innovation and technological progress. He also prompted social concern for the marginalized and poor and respect for democratic values.
The Nehruvian project was essentially about nation building. He sided with the modernists rather than traditionalists such as Mahatma Gandhi who believed that a new India could be built in its moribund villages.
Nehru realised that India could hold its own in the world only if its citizens developed a new national identity that went beyond the old tribal loyalties, build modern industry to give its economy strategic depth rather than stay happy selling plastic toys to the world, and a new scientific outlook that was suitable for an ambitious nation.
Nehru helped put together the basic building blocks of a new India. He was the socialist who laid the foundations of capitalist India, the sort of dialectical googly that history throws up every once in a while.
And as the country marks this auspicious day, we must remember the children who beg on the streets, the ones who are marginalised, and the ones who do not have a hope for a better tomorrow. We must stand together and fight for their lives and for our country’s destiny.