December 28, 2023

By Poornima Balasubramanyam

You have seen her. I am sure. Let us call her Malli. I like that name because Malli is the Tamil name for that glorious and most fragrant of flowers – the jasmine. Malli stands by the side of the construction site. She is wearing an old t-shirt that comes to well below her knees. It is of unknown provenance, because it is mostly the color of gravel dust, the same color as her face, her hair, and her feet. I cannot ever think of Malli without recalling at least one stray mongrel, same color, lingering about, alongside.

Malli is woken up by her parents, and with minimal preparation (a visit to the nearby open sewers, perhaps?), walks with them to the construction site. They are day laborers. She stays at the site all day, perhaps playing with other little Mallis on the site. At some point, her mother (occasionally father) calls her over to eat a bit of the food that they have bought from a roadside vendor. Rotis, idlis, something to be eaten with a chilli-based side that is hot enough on the palate to stanch the hunger. After that, it is more playing in the dirt, maybe throwing a stone at the mongrel, maybe rescuing the mongrel from another kid throwing a stone at it, but always, always, staring at cars going by, cars carrying beautiful people going about their beautiful lives. Here is the thing, if you can read this, you are one of the beautiful people she stares at. I am one of the beautiful people too. In the evening, on a good day, her parents give her a bit of food after they trudge back home to sleep off the exhaustion of the day. When Malli becomes old enough to carry a shallow bowl of gravel or a few bricks on her head, she will become a cash-earning member of her family. If she is deeply fortunate, she will not live in constant fear of being raped or abused from this moment onwards for the rest of her life, even as she brings forth other little Mallis into the world.

We all know that Malli needs to have a different day. She needs to get up in a safe place that has a stable roof over the head. She needs toilet facilities to start her day under sanitary hygienic conditions. She needs clean drinking water. She needs simple nutritious food. She needs clean clothes. She needs to be able to safely leave her home and go to school. In school she needs to be given the materials and teachers for an education that deals with her life with compassion, and teaches her about growing into a productive member of society.

What is the value of this? Most of all, every single one of these items goes towards giving Malli that most important of traits for a human - a voice. A voice that will be heard

Malli needs us. If we do not help to feed her, keep her safe, educate her, and nourish her body and her mind, we, the beautiful people, are doing little of value with our lives.

Poornima Balasubramanyam lives in Northern California. A BTech graduate of IIT-Madras, after completing her MS/PhD in Computer Sciences from University of Massachusetts, she has had a varied career working in the fields of computer vision, autonomous navigation, biophysics, mobile adhoc network security, and sensor security. Subsequently, she has worked on intellectual property issues for many of the leading computer technology firms in Silicon Valley, including Apple, Google, Meta, Salesforce, Intuit, Oracle, and Sun. Presently, she works in a pro-bono advisory capacity for small inventors and non-profit scientific research facilities. She also writes on a variety of issues