The True Meaning of Protection: Caring for Children Beyond Celebrations
Every year, for one day, India turns protection into a ritual. A thread is tied. A promise is spoken. A sibling stands taller, momentarily certain that someone, somewhere, will look out for them. It is a beautiful custom and it deserves the warmth it receives. But it is worth asking a harder, less comfortable question once the thread has frayed and the festivities have folded away into memory: what, exactly, has been protected and for how long? For the roughly 30 million children under five in India who, per the country's newest health survey, still carry the physical evidence of chronic undernutrition in their bodies, protection cannot be a single afternoon's gesture. It has to be a Tuesday in February. A Thursday in July. An ordinary, undecorated, unphotographed school-day lunch, arriving on time, every time, for two hundred-plus days a year. That is the protection that actually changes a life trajectory and it is the protection that receives, by comparison, almost none of ...