A paper on “Chokra”
The extent of pain some children in India have to go through, merely to survive is dreadful. By simply begging, a healthy child will not get the money and food it needs to survive. The terrible method of increasing the income of begging, parents and caretakers use, is basically making the children handicapped. It is exactly this method that is being used in the short story “Chokra” by Numair Choudhury. In the story, we get to hear about a girl called “Munmun”, who had been living in a kerosene drum when she was little, for the sole purpose of making her crippled. When begging with a handicapped or as one, people will have compassion and are more likely to give some money. For this reason, Munmun’s brother is pushing her around in a trolley, walking door-to-door. This method raises some new problems; angering people. Munmun's brother explains it this way: “Before, I used to wonder why the sight of Munmun and I angered people so much. It took a while before I understood. They could not stand our sight, we disgusted them; sickened them. Because we were what they might have to do themselves, one day, to their own children.” So the reason people sometimes slam their door in Munmun, and her brother’s faces, is because of fear. They fear that one day they might have to make their children handicapped for them to survive. No one likes the thought of hurting ones child, so when people see the two girls begging, they are trying to push away these thoughts. However, they are merely postponing the terrible decision.
The crippled beggars one can see in India are not only children of parents who cannot provide for their offspring. There is also a great deal of young crippled beggars is members of a “Beggar gang”. In these gangs, there is a leader who controls the business. He makes sure that the children are cripples in some way or another, and hereafter sends them out, begging in the streets. In these beggar gangs, children are used as begging “props” to maximize their earnings from sympathetic passers-by. The children return in the evening with the money they have “earned”, to the leader. In return, he provides the children with food and a place to sleep. An example of such a gang is seen in the movie “Slumdog millionaire”. In the movie, the protagonist and his brother are sleeping in a tent on a landfill, and suddenly such a leader of a beggar gang shows up and lures them into working for him. The difference is though that when the leader is about to make the protagonist crippled, he manages to escape.
Naturally one would want to give money to a beggar in such conditions as portrayed in “Chokra” and in “Slumdog Millionaire”. The problem is as seen that the money probably will not go to the beggars themselves but to the leader of a beggar gang. However, this sad truth should not stop us from being generous as there still are people who desperately need money. The difference lies simply in using wisdom and giving it to the right people.

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[ 1 ]. Choudhury, Numair, ”Chokra”, page 306 line 19-23