Children's Day in India

On the occasion of Children’s Day (celebrated in India on 14 November every year). Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, was born on 14 November, 1889. Children’s Day is celebrated every year to mark his birth anniversary as he was very close to children.
Milton remarks in ‘Paradise Regained’:

The childhood shows the man,

As morning shows the day.
(Book IV, lines 220-21)

It is indeed in childhood that the qualities are manifested and are exhibited in the child personality. The characteristics of personality can noticed right from the early childhood. Rightly has Wordsworth has expressed the same views when he says, “Child is the father of man”. Childhood is the formative period of a person’s life. The habits developed at this time cast a shadow throughout the life. This makes it all the more important that the negative traits exhibited by a child should not at all be ignored, otherwise they may become a habit and incorrigible later on.

The period of childhood has been glorified in English poetry – this also hints at the important place occupied by this period in our life. Childhood is just like the base of a building; the stronger the base, the stronger the construction. A child has been said to be close to God as Wordsworth says in his Ode to ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’. He says:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Carl Sandburg has said, “A child is God’s opinion that world should go on”. Every child is special in his own way. So let’s pledge on this day that we would stop child abuse and all forms of exploitation.