Honestly, you just have to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky punk? SM tipster Sabeena alerts us to this story at the BBC.
At a time when most children prepare to go to school, Saurabh Nagvanshi is off to the office.
Saurabh works at a police station in Raipur, the capital of India’s central state of Chhattisgarh. He is five years old.
He is part of an Indian system that allows a family member to take the post of a government employee who dies while in service.
There is no age limit and many families have no alternative but to send young children to work to make ends meet.
Saurabh has to feed a family of five and so his mother, Ishwari Devi Nagvanshi, holds his hand and takes him the 110km (68 miles) from Bilaspur, where they live, to Raipur.
Rest assured, Saurabh has been known to strike fear into the dark hearts of criminals:
He is quiet. If you try to talk to him he will either run away or hide behind his mother.
All joking aside this is a story that tugs at the heartstrings. There are a number of children in predicaments similar to that of Saurabh’s who are covered in the article. The money they bring in is a necessity for their poor families, but it comes at the expense of their childhood. Some human rights groups are raising objections to the system:
Subhash Mahapatra, president of a human rights organisation called Forum for Fact-finding, Documentation and Advocacy, goes further.
According to the Geneva Convention, he says, employing children as police officials and making them work at such a young age is against Indian and international laws.
“It is very similar to the definition of child soldiers as outlined by the United Nations,” he says.
Rohan Weerasinghe is the chosen one– chosen to head a major New York law firm, that is. Weerasinghe is now the Senior Partner at Shearman & Sterling. An American of Sri Lankan descent, he becomes the first brown person EVER to ascend such great heights.
