Lost Future - I

"Colorfull Images"..........on street children showing dark side of our society......think about them....they are our future........but lost in darkness..........due to our ignorance to their..........

There are no official statistics available on the number of street children in Pakistan. But local NGOs estimate the conservative figure to be around 100,000 all over the country, including 12,000 each in mega cities like Karachi and Lahore.
These paintings are thoughts on the daily tragedy on our streets. In no way does it provide a complete picture of the entire scale of the problem, as obviously that wasn’t the aim. Perhaps the goal was to simply make us, the viewers, think about the matter deeply, in the hope that one day it would lead to mass mobilization of action on the issue.

After all, what more can an artist do?

Each day we see images like these in real life without blinking for a second, but somehow when the misery is painted and the moment is seized on a large canvas, a moment of compassion coupled with shame resurfaces. The young boys and girls in the imagery look as alone and surrounded by darkness as in real life. Picture after picture, the loneliness of a child can be felt. ‘Children living on the streets are lonely individuals. They are alone even in the chaos of our cities; be it while walking in the middle of a traffic jam or sleeping on the hard pavement,

In some of the paintings, the artist uses clippings of English newspapers and wall chalking in Urdu as background textures. The news itself in the paper clips has no relation with the theme of the paintings, but is used only to highlight the fact that most of these children work as rag pickers; they collect the newspapers from our streets and sell it for recycling purposes to earn their livelihood.