Our permanently stunted children

Blighted childhoods are an urban reality as much as in the hinterland's perilous zones

A pet theme of Bollywood’s separated-at-birth plots is of the one brother who grows up to be a good cop, and the other an underworld criminal. The reality couldn’t be more distant from this lost-and-found pop fantasy. For instance, if they happened to be born around the villages of Muzaffarpur and other districts of Bihar and adjacent Uttar Pradesh, chances are they’d be lost early on from dire illness, malnutrition and impoverishment; and were they to survive the trauma, they would likely develop into physically stunted and emotionally depraved specimens.

An example of this is the recent hit Netflix series Delhi