Star of Oscar-winning documentary Smile Pinki, now 20, struggles to make ends meet
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Smile Pinki star, now a 12-class student, shares how she and her family areliving in extreme poverty and struggling to fulfil their most basic needs.
Megan Mylan's Oscar-winning documentary Smile Pinki focused on a girl named Pinki, as the title suggests, who was born with a cleft lip or a cleft palate, a condition that affects tens of thousands of children born in India every year. In 2009, the documentary bagged an Oscar in the documentary (short) category. At the time, the young girl was just 6 years old when she attended the prestigious award ceremony along with her father. Today, she is 20 and is still living in the same village.
Now, being a 12th-class student, she and her family have several pressing issues ahead of them and are least concerned about their past encounter with fame. Her family has now grown to six members and is currently struggling to make ends meet.
Pinki's father Sonkar still sells vegetables from his cart and he has to work really hard to fulfil their basic needs. To fetch water daily, her family has to walk over 100 metres to a well. Even the school where she is enrolled, SRVS Inter College in Ahiraura, is 9km from her village.
"My father has to work very hard to fulfil our basic needs. He has very little land. Selling seasonal fruits and vegetables is his only source of income,"Pinki told Hindustan Times. "See, the condition of my house. We have just two small rooms, one without a door."
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Friday, May 26, 2023 at 6:13 am