What Jehangir Told Me About the Lie of Laziness

Simon Reeves of the BBC made me cry last night.
No, not directly. He was simply sharing an update from one of his past documentaries. But it hit me in a way I didn’t expect.

The footage was actually from 2021, though I only stumbled upon the update recently. Still, it’s one of those stories that lingers in your soul long after the screen goes dark.

His name was Jehangir. A boy from Bangladesh.
Jehangir—such a grand name. In Persian, it means the conqueror of the world. But there he was, just ten years old, working under the punishing heat of a glass factory for less than 50p a day. The narrator said factories like that prefer child laborers—because they don’t complain as much, and their hands are small, nimble, fast.

Jehangir was working alongside his little sister. She had no shoes.
She was barefoot in a place where broken glass was part of the landscape.

Then he invited Simon and the film crew to see where they lived.
Simon tried to find words, but words failed.
It wasn’t a room.
It wasn’t even shelter.
It was a makeshift room—shared with 10, maybe 15 others. A hollow hall made of nothing, filled with tension. He said fights often broke out—people trying to steal each other’s food. Hunger makes people desperate.

And when Simon asked why his mother let him work in such dangerous conditions, Jehangir answered, with no hesitation, “Because of hunger.”

That was it. That simple.
That brutal.

And I cried.
I even cried again while writing this.

Because that sentence broke something open in me.

I thought about how many times I complain about my own life. About how I feel I don’t have enough, or how I worry I’m falling behind. But the truth is, I am so far from where Jehangir stood.

And yet, in comfortable circles—family gatherings, dinner chats, social media—I hear it often:
“People are poor because they’re lazy.”
As if poverty is always a result of bad choices. As if the poor are to blame for the system that keeps them crushed.

But Jehangir wasn’t lazy.
He was working. He was surviving. He was taking care of his sister.
He was doing more than most adults I know would be able to handle.

So no—poverty is not caused by laziness.
It is caused by hunger, by lack, by systems designed to benefit the few at the cost of the many.

It is caused by a world that lets a child stand barefoot in broken glass and call it life.

What Jehangir showed me was the quiet violence of inequality.
How power and wealth concentrate in one part of the world while another part burns and sweats and starves.

And he also showed me something else:
How dangerous it is to believe the lie of laziness.
Because that lie makes us numb.
It makes us feel justified in our comfort.
It makes us cruel without knowing it.

I want to remember Jehangir. He is not a statistic.
He is a boy with a name that means conqueror of the world.

And here is the most beautiful part—

In 2021, Jehangir is 25.
He has a wife. He has a son. And a battery-powered rickshaw of his own.
He is now a rickshaw driver—honest work, full of dignity.

It was UNICEF that helped reconnect Simon Reeves with Jehangir. When Simon met him again after all those years, he cried. He saw Jehangir’s son, and it was too much—the weight of what was, and what could still be.

Jehangir said one thing:
“I want to give my son a good education.”

And once again, I cried.

That dream alone—so quiet, so human—is a refusal. A rebellion.
A soft yet unshakable belief that his son deserves a different story.

And I pray, with every fiber of my being, that he gets to write it.

Karin Sabrina