Sharmila calls for educating children about AIDS
(No Ratings Yet)India does not pay enough attention to children, especially in the battle against AIDS, actress Sharmila Tagore has said.
“We do not take them (Children) very seriously, we are very dismissive of young people, we think they just listen MTV and are not serious, but they are,” Tagore, a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), told reporters yesterday.
Tagore, who featured in Hindi movies like Aaradhana, Amar Prem and Evening in Paris, said that people in India had been historically reluctant to talk about sex and sexually transmitted diseases.
But the country had now woken up to the scale of the potential crisis, she said.
“To some extent, the denial is over, but the stigma still remains,” said Tagore and added: “As parents, I think we can give our children roots and wings. When you give them morals, you give them roots, when you give them competence you give them wings. AIDS is about competence and wings.” Narrating her experience in Uganda at an international AIDS conference, she said: “We went to this little tiny place, in the middle of nowhere where I met a 12-year-old girl named Alice, who had lost her parents five years before and was forced to bring up her siblings alone.
“If timely treatment is given to these parents, they can live for 20 years longer, and they can bring up children,” she said.
New antiretroviral therapies should be made inexpensive and they were crucial because they could keep parents alive, while their children grew up, she added.
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