My parents grew up in India, and I could have lived there as well if life didn’t take the course it did. Things would have been very different for me, and it’s not the matter of which country I live in, but the life I would be forced to live. The movie LION opened my eyes entirely to the possibility that my life could have gone the same way as Saroo’s, (the main character), life did in the beginning of the movie. I was late to catch the bandwagon to see this movie, but it’s never too late to open one’s eyes and ears to finding out the truth. After all, that’s what LION is all about: the truth.

LION is a 2016 film about a child growing up in India who becomes dangerously lost as he separates from his family, his home, his language, and everything else he knew. Saroo, a helpless child, begged for food, scavenged for tools, and slept on the dangerously filthy streets of Calcutta, thousands of miles away from a home that he couldn’t even pronounce correctly. He was lost, trying to get home, and LION paints the all too terrifying truth about India’s poverty.

India’s poverty is unlike the “dirty” streets of New York and London. That is privilege compared to being a lonely child learning how to stay safe while sleeping on the streets of India. While India is a beautiful country, the poor experience something the poor here don’t. They are taken advantage of, used, tormented, and tortured. This movie can be difficult to understand, but my mother watched it with my sister and I to explain certain scenes that weren’t clearly described for good reason. Cruel, inhumane people who live for vanity take advantage of homeless children. They grab them in the middle of the night when no one is around to abduct them and remove their eyes so they will be blind. Blind kids earn more money when they are begging on the street, and the extra perk? They can’t see how much these people steal from them. Sold. This is the other outcome of homeless children. They are sold as work slaves or prostitutes, or some other job that defaces the beautiful humans they could have become. I was terrified that people would go after children that young, that innocent, and that helpless.

“Overpopulation is the reason,” my mother says, but if it is, then we need a better way to deal with it instead of scooping eyes out of children and selling kids as sex slaves. No, corruption is the reason, but how do we stop it? This has been going on for too long and India struggles to keep the balance of peace while the poverty population rises. The world moves on, but for those who sleep in streets tonight instead of beds, the world is a very dark and dangerous place to be. It’s a scary life, and we aren’t even living it.

At the end of the movie, my eyes watered to the rims as I choked back a waterfall of emotion while my sister could not conceal her tears. My sister never cries in movies, yet it was obvious that this movie had touched everyone in my family. India is where we are from, and although my sister and I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia in a more comfortable lifestyle, it frightens us at how peaceful our lives have been while so many have been suffering.

The movie ended and I was completely amazed by the film I had just watched and analyzed, but I was even more moved by what my mom told my sister and I. My mother did not come from a wealthy family in India. She was one of seven children in a nine person family that had to live in a one bedroom apartment. Her mother was a housewife and her dad worked for the police force. My grandfather was always an honest man and had some issues in his work, leading him to resign. A failed start up business later, and they were poor. Suddenly, supporting a nine person household became extremely strenuous. He struggled to find a job, so who did the responsibility go down to? The eldest child always had to carry the weight as displayed in LION. Hungry for work and grateful for pay, my mother’s older brothers got jobs to support the family. One visited every two years and brought gifts and clothes, another stayed with them but worked very hard every day, and another took a job on a boat. They worked hard to make sure that their family wouldn’t need to beg on the streets. The brothers had three younger sisters and didn’t want them to have to fend for themselves and sell themselves in order to get a simple meal. They sacrificed so much, but unfortunately, not all families are like that. My mother told us that if she didn’t have brothers that cared as much, we would have grown up in India doing the same things Saroo did to survive. I wouldn’t have had an education, I probably wouldn’t have even known how to read and write. I wouldn’t be able to do my favorite thing which is writing articles like this. I would have been too busy worrying if older men were going to pass by me, sell me, rape me, or scoop my eyes out with a spoon instead. And no, I am not exaggerating or acting paranoid. It seems fabricated and farfetched, but it happens, and that’s the plain truth.

LION stated that over 80,000 kids get lost in India every year and get mixed up in all the bad situations it is possible to get tied into. 80,000 kids. That’s more than a large college. That’s big enough to be a small country. More than that, it is too many kids to be lost and scared and vulnerable.

People don’t deserve such terrible things, especially children. I could have been one of them, but I wasn’t because there were others to help my mother out. The solution to fixing their failing family was helping each other out, which needs to happen everywhere. Sadly, people today aren’t as inclined to be kind and do the right thing as they are to do things the wrong way. That’s how we go backwards. The only way to move forward is to help each other instead of using each other, be there for others instead of ignoring their issues, and love instead of hate. It is such a simple concept, yet so difficult for humans to comprehend. Why? Because we are so focused on money and ourselves, we forget that there is a world around us with amazing people. We forget that we have more power than we assume and we take it for granted.

So if you go to India tomorrow and see a blind five year old on the street asking around for money, don’t give him fifty dollars for him to use. It is much more complicated than giving them what you think they need. What they need is protection, not money. Remember the men who remove their eyes? They steal money from them, so sadly when they make more money than usual, it is expected that they meet a daily quota. And if they don’t meet it? They get beaten. Poverty becomes complicated, much more twisted, and that is why India struggles with this. Poverty isn’t just a result of unemployment and overpopulation, it is a result of stolen opportunity and identity because as kids we build a name for ourselves, and if someone defaces it, it is hard to clean the slate and start fresh. So how do you help them?

There are schools that accept donations to teach less fortunate children and help them earn an education to make a better living. This is what they need. With the right education, children can be raised to be hardworking and honest in order to grow into adulthood and eventually apply for jobs to build a better future. Something as simple as school can make a difference. This is the type of opportunity they wait for.

So poverty is everywhere, and it stretches much further than simply sleeping on the streets. I truly believe that the saying “what goes around comes around,” is true, an honest cycle of right and wrong. So if we start the cycle off with treating the less fortunate like trash, what’s stopping them from growing up to be someone just as evil and cruel? It’s time to turn the cycle around, and it might take a while, but the outcome can build a better tomorrow, a better future for kids to pass along to others as they grow up.

Here are some organizations that work to end the cycle of poverty in India:

https://www.children.org/see-the-impact/where-we-work/asia-india

https://www.childrenshopeindia.org/project/educate-a-child/

https://www.ekal.org/donate