Woe is me, where is my childhood?
Have you seen my Childhood?
I’m searching for the world that I come from
‘Cause I’ve been looking around
No one understands me ......
It’s been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood I’ve never known...
I’m searching for .....
The dreams I would dare, watch me fly...
So goes the song of iconic King of Pop, Michael Jackson’s famous Childhood Song.

It’s a shimmering stage between infancy and adulthood. Childhood. Of rainbow reveries and resplendent rejoicing. Unfettered. Happy. Carefree. Crackling with cheerful chimeras. That picturesque panoply period of innocent impishness, puckish pranks and sunshine smiles soaked in surfeit joy and jauntiness. Delightful days when everything is etched in pastel of sugary thoughts and syrupy memories. 

For those born blessed with better station in life childhood days are such beauteous and joyous celebration in life. However, being young child does not always mean cocooned in the benign bosom of cheerfulness crackling with unsullied innocence and immeasureable joys. What about these Children of the Lesser God in the City who live in twilight zones sailing through Nature’s Ark of Time lost in hurly burly hardships of struggling existence. 

If one with maroon shirt and bowl in hand seems contemplating what morrow will be, another is having hearty laugh at how cruel life is while her bewildered brother looks on.

If another with rag and plate wonders whom to petition about their plight, another innocent seems curiously reflecting why her life is not as colourful and cheery as artistic ceramic creations that await customer’s eye.

As it is with likes of them, wiser and resigned, this bangle-bedecked pretty purveyor of puppet parakeets has hit the road going through life’s grind stoically as heavy traffic thunder past her furiously belching out smoke and soot.  Will these innocents ever envision as England’s Poet Laureate and High Priest of Nature William Wordsworth did in his reflections on Ode on Intimations of Immortality:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Aparelled in celestial light
The glory and freshness of a dream. 

Yes, will they ever hear “the joyous song of birds, give themselves up to jollity, enjoy the fullness of bliss, delight and liberty, the simple Creed of Childhood,” or left mourning for a childhood that is not their call and be left a child with brokern heart? Such then is their woe called childhood!