SEEKER OF TRUTH

A glowing tribute to the Indian social activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

“He wanted to change the world. But he was just one person.” Beginning with the inspirational tale of a hummingbird who carried water in its beak to fight a huge fire—“Little by little. Drop by drop”—Venkat retraces Kailash Satyarthi’s lifelong campaigns to end child labor and to promote children’s right to an education, from efforts at age 10 to help those who could not afford school books to later, large-scale initiatives, including the Global March Against Child Labor in 1998 and the Global Campaign for Education the following year. In her invitingly informal illustrations, da Silva Pereira depicts Satyarthi’s progress from individual action—publicly defying caste mores by eating food prepared by Dalits (“untouchables”) beneath a statue of Mahatma Gandhi—to rescuing enslaved children from factories and setting up temporary shelters. Finally, raising an arm on which the words “Freedom is non negotiable” are written, he ultimately leads large, racially diverse crowds of supporters. Between a photo and a painted version of him standing on the Nobel stage in 2014 next to co-winner Malala Yousafzai, the author closes with an eloquent quote that lays out his “vision of a world where every child has the right to their childhood.”

Significant reading for anyone who wonders what one person can do.