Just like any boy of his age, Javeed Yousuf Mir dreams big. He wants to become a surgeon. But this 13-year-old from Okay, Kulgam, knows that life is not all that smooth. And that is perhaps why he spends most of his time studying with his three friends in a small room of Bait-ul-Hilal, an orphanage run by the Jammu and Kashmir Yateem Foundation.

Javeed is a Class 8 student of the Salih Sublime School in Rajbagh, Srinagar. Unlike most of his classmates, he has no brothers or sisters, his father disappeared before his birth and his mother remarried, leaving him to fend for himself. Javeed was sent to Bait-ul-Hilal, more than 60 km from his native village, by his uncle in 2000 at the age of six. For the last seven years he has lived a life of destitution. And it is this experience that has given him the strength and has made him resolve that he will work his entire life for the welfare of others. "I want to become a doctor," Javeed says with a sparkle of optimism in his eyes. "I know it is a hard task. I am studying to achieve this target. I have to become a doctor to help the poor and the destitute."

Born in 1994, Javeed heard about his father's (Mohammad Yousuf Mir) disappearance from his relatives. He was yet to be born when his father went missing. "No body knows anything about him," he says. "Some people say that he was killed on the border, while some say he was arrested. My relatives say he is alive in a jail outside Kashmir," says Javeed.

... contd.