CHENNAI: When two college students —Sowmiya and Swetha — asked around 30 children of Kannagi Nagar and Ezhil Nagar resettlement colonies to draw pictures as part of a simple therapy, they had no idea what was to come.
When the children, mostly adolescents, were asked to draw pictures about life in the resettlement colonies, there were no usual sunny skies and happy children in playgrounds. Instead, there were scenes of child marriages, gang wars, police inaction and of sexual harassment. “We mainly asked the children to draw because we realised it was difficult to get them talking freely to us. We thought they would be more comfortable with art,” said Swetha B, an MSW student at the Madras Christian College.
One of the sketches had two boys standing face to face welding knives. The child writes above it Sandai poda koodadhu (Do not fight). Another child drew about how female students are harassed on their way to school. “We spoke to her and she said that she was regularly harassed on her way to school,” said Swetha.
One may ask why they don’t complain. The drawings have an answer to that too — a child carefully drew a red brick police station before proceeding to draw a large cross over it and writing beside it for clarity — “ The police officials here do not take up their responsibilities seriously.”
The children here live in a world of their own, very different from what someone outside the community would imagine. For instance, when the students asked a child who drew a scene that showed the lack of medical facilities, to elaborate, they expected the child to say something on the lines of the elderly and those who need immediate medical attention suffering without it. “But what she said was that if someone consumes poison or hangs himself or herself, there is no hospital nearby,” said Swetha.
All these drawings are reflective of what is wrong with the colony there, believe Sowmiya and Swetha, which is why they plan to take the drawings to the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board officials.