Aditya Anurag Nanda is studying at National Law University Odisha, Bhubaneswar
Writing for children is always loaded with fun elements as these stories are not bound by limitations of reality. In children’s world, everything is possible- turtles can fly, tiny fish can move mountains in search for their son,lions can have complex societal hierarchies, and true love’s kiss can save a girl who was poisoned by an apple. In a child’s fantasy world, the hero need not be a superhuman, rather he should have the willingness to stand firm on his feet to fight against the evil, villainous and wicked wrongdoer. In contrast to the easiness of writing for the children, writing by the children, relating to their reality is equally challenging. The juvenile lack the comprehension and articulation of their reality, which makes it difficult to connect with the adults. However, missing vocabulary is not an indication of missing strong emotions. Rather, they have a strong sense of comprehension, emotions and tenderness without knowing the ways to communicate it to the world.
The dichotomy of child’s problem is that humans, once adults, tend to learn to rationalize, forget, and laugh at all those concerns that once upon a time have bothered them the most. Fortunately, while writing for this magazine relating to frequent disasters and climate change impact on the children by the children, I am at such a crossroad of age where I can feel the pain, anguish, and sufferings of my contemporary and express it in words for the adults to understand.
My first direct exposure to disaster came at my 9th year of life in the name of Cyclone Phalin. At that age, I was unaware about the term cyclone, but was drawing the harrowing vibes of my surrounding people who were panic stricken after hearing the approaching cyclone. I was a bit apprehensive and simultaneously excited to feel the cyclone that my parents and grandparents were scared of. The previous cyclone that my family faced was the Super Cyclone 1999, that devasted Odisha’s ecology and economy, having severe impact on my grandfather’s hometown. The news of approaching cyclone in 2013 unwrapped the hidden trauma of the past and made them scared. However, on the D-Day, it was high speed winds accompanied by torrential rainand shortage of water supply along with complete blackout for a couple of days.
I remember the unfurling of this climatic event, which had not directly affected me then, but the indirect impact was immense. My play time with friends got abandoned for a number of days, the scarcity of water supply forced us to take fewersips over days, and the worst was the darkness of the nights, as electricity was still disrupted by heavy winds. This experience of 2013 got repeated in following years- 2014, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and in2022. The only difference in all those years of climatic vulnerability is related to magnitude of cyclonic disasters and varied sufferings. All throughout my childhood, cyclones were not the only climaticevent that generated discontentment within me. A series ofdisastrous events like heat waves, flash floods and lightning incidents have affected my time as a child. Most of the time, in response to the approaching climatic events, my outdoor playtime with my friends, a vital learning phase in every child’s life, was abandoned. It generated displeasure that got pacified by gluing to the cartoons in the digital world.
“Just Stay at Home” instructions to avoid the disasters were at its peak during the spread of Covid pandemic as well. In previous climatic situations, we as children, were confined to the four walls of house for couple of days, but the highly contagious disease forced us to be at home for several months, without going to school or playing outdoors with our friends. The chaos, confusion related to the disease and its detrimental health impact were frightening, disturbing, and tormenting us from within, that we as children,wereunable to express to our adults, who were already suffering due to the economic shut down.
The pandemic created another strong rippling impact on our studies, especially related to the mode of exam, that assess our accumulation of knowledge over the academic years. The confusion related to on- line and off-line mode of examinationor cancellation of the same leading to automatic promotion of all the appearing students to the next class during that academic year generated lots of anxiety within us. Duringthose moments of uneasiness, apprehension and eagerness, I wanted to explore the mental condition of my contemporaries by conducting a research. In the time of lock down the obvious choice of data collection was on-line mode to reach out to the young minds. I realized at that point of time that the disasters be it climatic or pandemic might be having some indirect impact on us. For all the impoverished children, disaster shortened their childhood by imposing compromise on education, health and nutrition and pushing them early to the phase of adulthood to be engaged in earning for the family. Many adolescents had to leave the studies because their parents could not afford the smart devices or had the means to send their children to such devices for online classes. Many youngsters who lost their parents to Covid are leading a life without adult protection and had to discontinue their
studies. Economic crash and reduction in family income increased cases of domestic violence, silently impacting the fragile emotions of little ones and have affected their personality andconcentrationas well.
In totality, it can be said that the climatic irregularities and pandemic took away a vital time of lives, without giving us any positive environment of learning. Specifically, the pandemic introduced us to new emotions of mistrust, selfishness and obedience before authorities. In these horrifying years of pandemic and frequent disasters, I feel that something wrong is happening to the orderof the world and this is primarily because of the human behavior. This issue of climate change is impacting everyone’s life and yet, we wish to shift it under the carpet. This needs to be fixed right now or the final blow to the world will be a lot bigger than the pandemic, and future children might be unable to absorb it.