Kareem Bhai:An old paper boy

Imagine not getting your daily dose of news at your doorstep every morning. Imagine the sheer number of people who read newspapers every day. We all have become so ignorant that we don’t realise it even delivering a newspaper requires a pure human labour which goes into the final delivery of news.

A 60-year-old man from Abids, Hyderabad is doing such a good thing for those poor young children who can’t afford to go to school. So he distributes free newspapers daily and demands them understand it. Kareem is a retired daily-wage laborer, has a family of 8 members and to feed his own family he started doing this work.

This job is inconceivable and hard as you have to accelerate to your work and report it at 4 A.M. Then you’ve to collect your bunch of newspapers from a footpath based distributor. After that you’ve to sort, stack it and cycle your way through the neighborhood and areas nearby. When asked about the youth, he said “Youth has stopped working hard! They drink, smoke, go to college and movies. My own son has never come to work here. Though our work times are very non-obtrusive, and you have the whole day for yourself, the youth has stopped coming to work, it’s a few old men like me. And surprisingly, school-going boys who want to earn that extra rupee, be it for their pocket money or needs, who are delivering papers”.

Kareem has tried his best to push young children to start reading as he says: “Education and intelligence are very different things, and to be intelligent you need to be aware, so I know I cannot make them go to college or maybe they cannot afford it, but with their school knowledge and reading habit, they’ll be aware of the workings of this world”. We must acknowledge the determination, and the sheer physical and mental hard work that goes into the simple everyday activity of delivering a paper at your doorstep. Next time, if you ever wake up early, say hello to your paperboy or may be call him in for tea! They deserve a lot more recognition and respect than what they are being given.