Whenever you think of kids, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Their innocence and how clueless they are about life. That’s how it is supposed to be. Life has to give them time to grow up and understand the ways of the world. A child is not meant to see horrors that even grown ups can’t endure. But not all kids are lucky enough to lead a normal life. Not all of them get the childhood they deserve.
What can be worse than kids suffering? The world is really a cruel place. If you don’t believe it, have a look at these 20 pictures which will surely stir your soul:
1. A cancer patient draws her dream on a mirror.
2. An 8-year-old receives the flag for his father who was shot in Iraq a few weeks before he was due to return.
3. A young Brazilian violinist weeps as he pays tribute to his idol, his teacher.
4. Two kids turned into scavengers in Nepal.
5. Aylan Kurdi’s body washed ashore after he drowned trying to escape from Syria. His brother and mother also drowned.
6. ‘The Afghan Girl’. Her eyes shout out emotions that are too difficult for us to even fathom.
7. Eyes that witnessed a cataclysmic event. She witnessed the Hiroshima bombing and that was the last thing she saw.
8. A kid in South Sudan dying of hunger.
It is said that the vulture was actually waiting for the kid to die and the photographer was asked not to touch the kid with fear of disease transmission. He won the Pulitzer Prize for this photo but committed suicide 3 months later because of the horrors he witnessed.
9. Body of a child dug out after the Bhopal Gas Tragedy.
10. A small girl raises her hands thinking the camera is a gun.
Because that is what she is used to.
11. This brave soul after she survived 11 days in a Siberian Forest.
One can’t even begin to imagine what she must have gone through.
12. A child hugs his cat after an earthquake measuring 6.1 destroyed his village in China.
13. The hand of a child whose has suffered the horrors of a famine.
14. A kid salutes a soldier who died.
15. A girl from Gaza shuts her doll’s eyes to prevent it from seeing the horrors she witnesses.
16. A kid is tied to a pole in China because his sister was recently ‘stolen’ and his parents can’t afford day care. The family stays in a 9 ft x 8 ft room.
It isn’t cruelty, it is desperation.
17. And this young kid in India is chained because he has cerebral palsy and his grandmother sells toys on the streets for a living.
He does not have his parents. Another case of desperation. She ties him for his own protection.
18. A young African girl being fed like an animal in a human zoo in Belgium during the late 1950s.
19. An infant, alone and stranded, cries desperately.
20. Bloody footprints of kids who tried to escape during a genocide in Rwanda.
