Face serious, little bunny teeth showing, Ayan Mohammed, aged seven and a half, has a few important messages for the migrant labourers in his neighbourhood.
“This is corona time and you can’t go home. You need to stay wherever you are. Once corona is over, you can go home,” Ayan tells the workers in fluent Hindi in a video shot by his elder brother Nihal, barely pausing for breath before he goes on to show them how to wash and keep their hands clean.
Ayan lives in Madavoor, a village in Kozhikode, and the workers are from West Bengal, working in Kerala for their livelihood. When the coronavirus outbreak happened, migrant workers in Kerala had come out on the streets in large numbers, demanding to go home. While the government and the police have been trying to convince them of the situation that is preventing anyone from travelling far now, little helpers like Ayan have also been doing their bit.
“He picked the language up watching cartoons like Chhota Bheem and Doraemon in Hindi. There are some Tamil cartoons too, so Ayan can manage Tamil as well. I think one should encourage young children to watch cartoons in other languages. That seems to be an easy way to pick up new tongues,” says Ayan’s father Saleem Madavoor, a teacher and politician, leader of the Loktantrik Yuva Janata Dal (LYJD) party.
Nihal, who is 14, took it upon himself to prepare hand wash for migrant workers in the neighbourhood. He took his little brother along to demonstrate how to use it, speaking to the labourers in Hindi. That’s when the family noticed the little boy speak so fluently in Hindi.
“We had no idea he had picked up Hindi so well. I know Hindi but we never speak it at home to the kids. When we realised Ayan could communicate so well and the labourers also seemed interested to listen to him, we began speaking to them in batches of four or five,” Saleem says.
Ayan is a student of the Madavoor AUP School where his mother Saida works as a teacher. He also has an elder sister Fathima Neha, who is a student at Amritha Agricultural College.
Watch:
Young Ayan from Kozhikode, unknown to his parents, had picked up Hindi watching cartoons on TV. They knew it only when they watched him speak in fluent Hindi to migrant workers about all the precautions to take during COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/c6sX9LWqjg
— Cris (@cristweets) April 26, 2020