Underprivileged Children

God has created all the people in this world. He has made some of us more privileged than others. Some people live in much more luxury and comfort than others. Today, in especially the third world countries, there is a huge discrimination between the rich and the poor. The rich people live in huge buildings and apartments, while the poor do not even have a roof over their heads. While the affluent dress in their finest apparels and eat the tastiest delicacies, the poor people wrapped in tattered clothes, hunger for a crumb of bread.

In our country, the same situation prevails. Majority of the country's poor people lead their lives in deplorable conditions. They live in broken-down, squalid shantytowns and slums. The harsh truth is that those of us living in luxury do not even know about the pathetic situation that prevails in the slums of our country. The environment is a very filthy and unhygienic. Various severe diseases originate from these crowded, unhygienic slums. Malnourished children, all skin and bones, run around unfed and unclothed. Most of these children are uneducated and do not go to school. Instead they set out to earn for their families. Some work as child labour, while others beg for a living. Many a times these poor slum children, desperate to find a source of income for the family, turn to crimes. These slums are the breeding ground for crime and criminals. Nothing is done to actually try and remove the poverty and help the people living there. Usually, people take slums to be dreadful places, inhabited by the destitute. How many of us actually have ever looked down from the windows of our apartments into the slums down below and done nothing but wrinkled our noses in disgust? We have never considered that down there live young children just like us, who are not blessed with all those privileges that we enjoy.

Have we ever considered what is that we, the privileged children have that an underprivileged child of the same age is deprived of? The answer is… almost everything. We live in luxury and grandeur, while these children live in great hardship. We receive the best education from the best schools of the country, while these poor children remain uneducated. We do not even do our own work knowing that the housemaid will do it for us. On the other hand these children have to work hard for a living. Our closets overflow with fancy dresses and such, while the poor children do not even have one proper set of clothes. We get to relish the different exquisite mouth-watering dishes, while they do not even get a proper meal a day. Most importantly, we are always being pampered and doted by our parents and guardians, while these poor children do not receive proper love and affection from their parents. High rates of divorce among the slum population adds to the misery of these children even more. Deprived of affection and deprived of the fundamental necessities of a human being, the child sees no future. When he realizes that he has nothing to gain form life and nothing to lose, he slowly turns to crime.

The poor families usually have a number of mouths to feed and so what the children earn contribute a lot to their family's income. In order to earn for their families, many of these children sell flowers, candies and newspapers at traffic signals. When cars stop, they run from window to window, frantically searching for a customer who would buy their items. How many of us actually heed these small children? How many of us shoo them away and reprimand them for soiling the clean window of our expensive car, instead of feeling sympathetic towards them and thinking about all the hardship they are going through to earn for their families?

Coming to a very important issue…child labour. This issue is very vital in context of our country, where child labour is widely practiced. Children well below the working age are made to work in houses and factories. Often these children work in very harmful and hazardous conditions. With the advent of garments industries, the number of child labours had increased even more. But due to conditions imposed by the importing countries against child labour, the situation has dramatically improved. Thanks to the many NOGs and non-NGOs that had been working relentlessly to improve the situation. NGOs like BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), UCEP (Underprivileged Children's Educational Programme) ASA, PROSHIKA etc. and hundreds of non-NGOs are offering free education and vocational training to these slum children. Now most of the working children can go to school, as well as work to earn for their families. Many of these schools donate clothes to these children, especially during the Eid festivals.

The small children who work in our houses as house-helps can also be classified as child labours. These children are living in our houses and doing almost all the work for us. As they toil away in front of our eyes, do we ever consider the difficulties they face being born as underprivileged children? How many of us actually think twice before misbehaving with them? We should consider about their deprivations and should definitely try to change our behaviour towards them. We could actually try to help them out by sending them to those free schools and perhaps helping them with their homework.

Previously, the issue of children's rights, especially the rights of underprivileged children, just remained restricted to round-table conferences, slogans and rallies, the impact of which was futile. But now these NGOs and non-NGOs have done some really commendable work. Theses private organizations along with the government organizations, have done a lot to improve the situation and have achieved great success over the years. They are still working hard to further improve the situation of the underprivileged people. We should also come forward and spend a little bit of our leisure time for the aid of these underprivileged children. In fact it is our moral duty and obligation to come forward and help these destitute underprivileged children, so that they can also live a decent life when they grow up.

On the 20th of November, World Children's Day is celebrated universally. On this day, let us all make a resolution to try our best to help out the hundreds of underprivileged children all over the world.

By Nusrat

VIRUS BASICS

In this age of Net-addicts, users must be very careful not to tug worms and catch seasonal viruses from the vastest source of infestation possible- The Internet. But this is easier said than done. Everyone knows that computer viruses, like their biological cousins, are bad news, but beyond this and perhaps a rough understanding very few can distinguish one from another or describe just how these pests operate. To shed some light on the subject, following are three main virus forms and basic descriptions of what they do.

Macro Viruses-most often infect Microsoft Office documents and other similar document forms; they are especially fond of Word, Excel and Outlook. They typically employ visual basic scripts and are distributed by email. Macro virus payloads, which are set in motion when an infected application is run, are generally not extremely vicious but nonetheless are certainly unwelcome and at the very least highly annoying to victims. The most famous macro virus is Melissa who gained infamy in the spring of '99 by spreading itself via victim Outlook address books. Melissa did not cause tremendous damage to individual users but did substantial damage to large corporate networks that were forced to shutdown under the onslaught of emails produced by its multiplicative spreading.

File Infectors - do their dirty deeds by attaching themselves to executable code in files with extensions such as .com or .exe or in more extreme cases these viruses can get into operating system execution files with extensions including .sys, .prg and .dll among others. When an infected program or OS is run the virus code of the file infector gains access to the host (victim) system by entering along with the legitimate code it has attached itself too. Trojan horses can propagate as part of file infector viruses.

Boot-sector Infectors-infects system code such as the boot sector of floppies or the Master Boot Record on hard drives. Once an infected drive (floppy or hard drive) is booted, these viruses load themselves into the system memory of victim machines. A process that makes users unaware of their presence...well, at least not at first, but more on that a bit later. Once in memory, boot-sector infectors can infect any file that is executed.

Worms fall into this category. Worms do not alter files but deliver their payload by means of propagation and are very hard for victims to be aware of and usually become evident when their intense regeneration grinds victim machines down to a halt by increasingly eating up system resources. The good news is- turning off an infected machine purges these viruses from system memory.

By Synergie