Meena is the message
No Superhuman feats for her, no inter-galactic forays, and certainly no dishum-dishum crime-busting scenes. Ten-year-old Meena, the video cartoon character, is on a different, more arduous, mission. Perhaps an impossible one too. For she is out to change the mindset of South Asians about young girls, their rights and abilities.
Brainchild of the Kathmandu-based Unicef´s office for South Asia, and seven laborious years in the womb, Meena was launched in late September, to coincide with the Week of the Girl Child. Even at launch, which was meant to have been SAARC-wide but was only partially so, it was obvious that the little girl character has a tough fight ahead of her. This comes in the form of nationalist mindsets among politicians and civil servants, and the question of national turf.
The reluctance in some quarters to go all-out with Meena is regrettable, for she has the revolutionary potential to change attitudes towards girls in the Subcontinent. Meena is a unique public media project in the sense that her 13-part TV series about children´s lives has been crafted to a great extent by children themselves. Over 10,000 children across the region were consulted for the venture, with changes and alterations tailored to the feedback by a "focus group".