About the Author and the Text

Anees Jung — the author

Anees Jung is an Indian writer, journalist and columnist known for her sensitive attention to the lives of ordinary people, especially the poor and the powerless. Growing up in a cultured, educated family and later working widely in journalism, she developed a keen eye for social injustice and a gift for writing about it with warmth and clarity rather than dry statistics. Much of her work gives a voice to those whom society tends to overlook — women, children and the marginalised — and she is admired for portraying their circumstances with dignity and compassion. In "Lost Spring" this same quality is at work: she does not lecture the reader but lets the reality of poverty and child labour speak through the individual children she meets.

The text and its source

The chapter "Lost Spring", prescribed in the CBSE Class 12 English NCERT (Flamingo) syllabus, is taken from Anees Jung's book "Lost Spring: Stories of Stolen Childhood." As the book's subtitle suggests, its theme is childhood that has been taken away — the way grinding poverty and exploitation rob poor children of the freedom, play and hope that childhood should hold. The book grew out of the author's observation of children forced into labour instead of school, and the chapter studied here draws two representative pictures from that larger canvas.

The two parts of the chapter

The lesson is built in two distinct sections, each focused on a different community and a different child, so that together they present two faces of the same problem.

The first part, titled "Sometimes I Find a Rupee in the Garbage," is about the ragpickers of Seemapuri, a settlement on the edge of the city. It centres on Saheb, a young boy who, along with many other children of families that migrated from Bangladesh, spends his days scavenging through heaps of garbage. For these families the rubbish dump is a means of survival, and for the children the occasional find of a coin or a small treasure becomes a fragile source of wonder. This part exposes the poverty, statelessness and lost freedom of the ragpicker children.

The second part, titled "I Want to Drive a Car," moves to Firozabad, a town famous for its glass-bangle industry. It follows Mukesh, a boy born into a family of bangle-makers, who works in the dangerous heat of the glass furnaces. Unlike most around him, Mukesh nurses a dream of a different life — he wants to become a motor mechanic and drive a car — even though caste, poverty and a web of exploitation seem designed to trap his community in the same trade generation after generation. This part exposes child labour, hazardous working conditions and the vicious circle that keeps the bangle-makers poor.