Power To The People
Reader's Digest India|February 2019

Anshu Gupta’s Goonj has created a new paradigm of giving, transforming lives in villages across India.

Sanghamitra Chakraborty
Power To The People

IN THE EARLY ’90s, Anshu Gupta, then a young freelance journalist, used to roam the streets of Delhi in search of stories of people who remained invisible. This is when he met Habib bhai, a middle-aged man who lived on the pavement outside Delhi’s LNJP Hospital and delivered unclaimed dead bodies to the police. His cart was a moving advertisement for his work—‘laawaris laash uthaane wala’ scribbled on it. Habib bhai got paid `2 and some cloth for every dead body he handed over to the police. The winter months were busy, Habib bhai had said matter-of-factly. After all, many more homeless people died in the bitter Delhi cold— sometimes up to 10 to 12 a day.

Gupta followed him around for a whole week to understand what it meant to be a bearer of unclaimed corpses. His middle-class notions about the boundaries of what was human were shaken, but not shattered— until he met six-year-old Bano, Habib bhai’s daughter. “When it gets too cold, I go to sleep hugging dead bodies,” she had said with a bland expression. “It keeps me warm, and the best part is, dead people do not move—you get to sleep peacefully.”

Trained to be a journalist, Gupta never quite forgot what he saw and heard during his week with Habib bhai—the heart-wrenching struggles of the dispossessed for daily survival. It was often not the cold but the inadequate clothing that triggered the needless loss of lives.

Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 2019-Ausgabe von Reader's Digest India.

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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 2019-Ausgabe von Reader's Digest India.

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