Who is Kailash Satyarthi? That is the question most Indians asked when he won the Nobel Peace prize along with Malala Yousafzai earlier this month. Many of us were ashamed that we did not know who this man was even while we knew about Malala.

To answer the question, Satyarthi is a child-rights activist. His fight is against child labour. But he symbolises more than India’s pathetic record on taking care of its weak. He symbolises the larger media problem of treating issues, stories or people who are not core to middle-class India or its concerns as non-essential. And no, this is not a media bashing piece - this is about both the media’s callousness and that of the audience it serves and the mutual ignorance this breeds.