Nandana’s reality check

Actor, activist and teacher, Nandana Sen has juggled different roles very well. Debayani Bose chats up the multi-faceted personality, who recently was a member of the jury in the public hearing on child trafficking and Right to Education

You have donned many hats and worked as an activist, actor and also a teacher. Which of the roles describes you best?

I don’t think it is a coincidence that ‘actor’ and ‘activist’ share their root verb! To ‘act’ is, essentially, to ‘do’— and to engage or compel others to ‘act’ as well. All three roles you mention require a great deal of passion, total emotional commitment, and most importantly, a strong desire to reach out and touch other people’s lives. In my life, all three are powerfully connected and often, wonderful intersections arise between them spontaneously.

Both have been integral to my life for years. Even during college at Harvard, I worked as a survivor advocate for physically or sexually abused women and children. I believe all of us need to use every tool we can to make the world safer. As actors, we have the opportunity, like no other profession, to build awareness and make a deep impact. For example, years ago, performed the role of an incest survivor overcoming her trauma in the play, 30 Days in September, sponsored by the NGO RAHI, at Prithvi. After the opening show, a girl from the audience embraced me in tears — she said watching me was like looking at her own self in the mirror. That was the first time she broke her own silence about her repeated abuse by her uncle, and soon after, this brave girl confronted him too. She wasn’t the only survivor who reached out to me — I was so touched by all the calls, messages and emails I got — and this play was by far one of my most moving experiences as an actor.

More recently, I completed Chuppee, a short feature sponsored by UN Women to promote awareness of child sexual abuse. This film is being shown in schools and community gatherings.

The public hearing on child rights focussed on a child’s fundamental right to free education (RTE Act), as well as the horrifying crime and trauma of child trafficking. The hearing was historic and urgent, and it was disturbing to see the levels of inaction, incompetence and neglect that persist in the field of child education and protection. I was horrified by the cases of trafficking at the hearing — I met and spoke with several of the trafficked girls privately so they didn’t have to make a public statement, and their stories were shocking and tragic.

To me, the most unforgivable violation of child rights, we encountered repeatedly, is the abuse of authority. We found that frequently, individuals with the responsibility of protecting children were themselves the violators — headmasters charging illegal fees, excluding ST/SC students or refusing admission to HIV positive children, school inspectors pocketing the Mid-Day meal fund, police letting identified child traffickers go free, family members participating in the trafficking, to name just a few. What can be more deplorable than children being exploited by those who are supposed to keep them safe? It became clear at the hearing how much rudimentary work we still have to do on an urgent basis to keep our children healthy and safe, to empower them, and work towards creating a better future for them.

An extremely important question that can be best assessed by each parent, as every child’s level of maturity is different. Beyond doubt, parents must deal with sex education head-on and raise it with their children early, with no embarrassment — discuss, not just protection from child pregnancy, but also from sexual abuse, a huge and neglected crisis in India. I realised from my Unicef visits to the Deepshikha Adolescent Empowerment Program and Red Ribbon Clubs in Mumbai that children are often much more progressive than their parents might be. When the kids don’t shy away from educating their peers about safe sex and AIDS awareness, why should the parents? Perhaps it’s time for the parents to grow up.

The problems are enormous and innumerable, but I feel the most important step is to truly prioritise, from our hearts, protecting the children of India. Yes, it is a start to make good rules but that’s not enough — we must make sure they are implemented in an urgent, timely way. Truly taking care of our children has so many aspects, including nutrition, education, health care, personal safety, life skills, ending hazardous child labour, building appropriate infrastructure, and so on. And to do this, we have to stop passing the buck and start holding ourselves accountable — we can’t just say that’s happening far away from me so it’s not my problem. As a nation, we need to go through a paradigm shift — we must see every child as our own, we must make child protection every citizen’s responsibility.

Activists are necessary in the world, but in a film, they often come across as righteous, boring and unbearably preachy, don’t they? (laughs) But yes, I will be playing an idealistic journalist with an activist’s sensibility in one of my forthcoming films. But I must make sure, she’s fun and easy-going too. — TWF