Giving a voice to the voiceless

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Shobha Warrier

“Can I talk to Krishnaveni?” Shobha Warrier asked Dr Manorama. “No, you can’t,” she was told. “Why not?” she demanded. “She is no more,” was the reply. Shobha was shocked to learn of the teenager’s death, but she knew it was coming. The girl was an ‘AIDS orphan’ — a child of parents who died of AIDS.

Shobha had met Krishnaveni and Ravi, as toddlers, on one of her visits to Dr Manorama’s ‘CHES Ashram’ — a home for AIDS orphans in Chennai. “At the time the discrimination against HIV affected people was really bad,” says Shobha, who has been a journalist for 30 years. Krishnaveni’s face refused to go away from her mind. She made an entry about the girl in the diaries she wrote for rediff.com where she worked. Thirty-six such entries of marginalised people in her diaries — of AIDS orphans, HIV+ people, gays, sex workers, transgenders and abandoned mothers — became a book titled The Little Flower Girl and Others: The Diary of a Journalist, released recently by Dr Shashi Tharoor.
“I never wanted to be a journalist,” says Shobha. “I used to write short stories in Malayalam. Once N.R.S. Babu of Kala Kaumudi asked me to
write on the reading habits of the young, like a short story and it became a cover story for Kala Kaumudi. And I became a journalist.”
She meets a lot of well known personalities in the course of her work, but it is the marginalised she wanted to write a book for. “To lend a voice to the voiceless, to make the invisible visible and to bring the marginalised within the folds of society,” she says.