“I don’t take his money, though. I steal something better.”, “I take his brightly colored storybook and make it mine.” says Lakshmi, the thirteen-year old protagonist of Sold by Patricia McCormick, who lived with her family in a small hut on a mountain in Nepal, who was “sold” by her own father to a brothel house called the “Happiness House”, when one of the inmates, Harish or the David Beckham boy as she calls him, opens the world of books and letters for her. Upon reading the lines, one can discern the fervent yearning that emanates from this young girl's desire for education. Can a girl, who has been forced into prostitution after being “sold” by her stepfather, accomplish this goal? “Happiness House”-see the irony? A place, where all her dreams were shattered, her body was seen as a mere commodity for sexual gratification, her “no hips” and “plain as porridge” appearance was cruelly treated by the men coming and going through the halls- named ...
As John F. Kennedy says, “The right of everyman is diminished when the rights of one man is threatened.” Human rights is a commonly discussed matter. There are institutions like The National Human Rights Commission of India, National Commission for Women, National Commission for Minorities and so on. These work to ensure that people are not denied their rights anymore, but there is a category of people we often forget who are also denied their rights. They are the one who are behind the bars, the prisoners who are in under trial jails. Prisons are important as they as the ultimate tenderness, as the curtailment of liberty, it has a way for the state to isolate those actors which pose threat to society and performs its part of the social contract of maintaining security. Prison life is an open secret, everyone has a vague idea of what happens in a prison but no one is sure and there is hardly any conversation about it. The four walls of a prison today serve double pur...