This has been haunting me for weeks:

Last time I was in India I took my children to the largest children’s prison in Bombay—it’s called a “remand home.” In India the police can pick up a child for the simple crime of being a runaway and can put the kid in jail along with hardened convicts, and you can imagine what happens. The same is true for mentally retarded children. When we went there we heard this screaming and there was this five-year-old mentally retarded child who was being bullied by the other prisoners. He was completely defenseless. I took my kids there because I wanted them to see it.

From The Believer’s interview with Suketu Mehta, the author of Maximum City. Mehta has been battling India’s notorious bureaucracy to set up a legal defense fund for Indian street children. He’s also writing a new translation of Gandhi’s autobiography, which he says will be much better than the existing one – although that version, badly written or not, certainly had a salutory effect on me.