by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 9, 2009 | Uncategorized
Never say never is a maxim I should have by now learnt to accept and follow. Once again I find myself in a situation where I have to get off my high horses and humbly accept what I haughtily rejected till date. But necessity is the mother of all inventions and faced with rapidly dwindling bank balances and a shrinking donor base one has to meekly accept to eat the humble pie. I must admit that what makes this possible is the magnitude of what is at risk.
To understand what I am trying to say one needs to go back several years, to the times when pwhy was still in its infancy and one was looking for possible ways to secure it and see it grow. One of the avenues suggested was to seek sponsorships for individual children as that was tested ground and one that had proved very successful. Never said I, as to me it had always seemed a rather condescending approach and one that led to marginalise children: the sponsored one versus the one without a sponsor. I stood my ground and must admit met with reasonable success as we managed to go and grow my way for almost a decade.
I have always been aware of the fragility of our funding model and have never stopped looking and thinking of better ways. Our one rupee a day programme failed to take off for reasons that I still cannot fathom. To me it seamed absurdly simple and eminently doable. And yet it did not work. I guess the amount sought was too small and did not give the donor the fillip it sought. Planet why us definitely the panacea of all ills, but comes a huge price and will take a long time to come by. In the mean time a family of almost a 1000 now has to be sustained in the times of recession.
I have been vociferously claiming that the crises we face is not an economic one but a moral one. I have been clamouring that was was needed was to find ways of reinstating values like compassion and empathy as I feel that it would go a long way in redefining our lives. Time to walk the talk even it it means giving up long held views. To survive today we too need to reinvent ourselves and what takes precedence is the lives and dreams of the children of pwhy and not some highfalutin idea one had once held. So I find myself extolling the sponsorship avenue: yes you heard right I am seeking sponsors for our children to enable us to carry on. True that we have had to modify the approach to our reality: we are not asking for a sponsor per child but for people accept to sponsor either one child with disability or two creche children or again 4 primary or secondary kids. We would provide information about the group selected to all sponsors.
Wow.. I have come a log way. What still irks me a little is the fact that whereas this approach seems to find takers, the one rupee programme which to me was easier on the pocket never really took off. I guess that the reason for this is that the later was too impersonal and did not give the donor the high that accompanies any act of charity!
Beggars cannot be choosers; one had to respect market forces; all is fair in love and war… There are many things I can say to myself to assuage ruffled feathers and yet the moral of the story is that one has to learn never to say never again.
by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 8, 2009 | Uncategorized
A pair of glasses, a pocket watch, a bowl and wooden slippers went under the hammer, amidst high drama ,for a whopping 1.8 million US dollars. I have been watching with sadness interspersed with bouts of anger the dramatics enfolding in front of my eyes since the day news about the imminent auction of Mahatma Gandhi’s personal belongings broke. A land, that has not only forgotten the true meaning of his message but seems to revel in perpetrating the exact opposite, suddenly wants to lay claim to the legacy. Outrage is expressed at every corner, more so as the country is soon to face an election. Every political party wants to be politically correct! Even if it means resorting to untruths!
How hollow and pitiful we all look. I wish we could for once at least, be honest and truthful – qualities extolled by Bapu – and look at ourselves with candor. Here we are voicing horror at seeing Bapu’s personal belongings been sold in public but have ever respected any of his teachings. Have we kept his real legacy alive? Just yesterday two dalits were hacked to death for offering prayers in a temple and a city woke up to hate posters against minority religions. One may ask if we are worthy of Gandhi’s legacy. Nothing around us seems in sync with what he taught, defended and died for. We are still the land where little girls get killed before they are born, where a child may lose her fingers for a handful of spinach, a land where religion, education, spirituality and even Gandhi are being commercialised to the hilt. So one may ask if we are worthy of Gandhi’s at all.
One can go on merrily listing all that makes us the antithesis of what Gandhi stood for: we are the land where children have had to wait for half a century for education to become a constitutional right while a bill to raise salaries of parliamentarians is cleared in a trice. Need I say more. We build walls to keep our own away and do not feel revolted when a little beggar girl knocks at the window of our car or feel outraged at any attempt to disturb social equations.
I wish the hullabaloo about Gandhi’s memorabilia will make us look deeper at the values this remarkable man stood for. That we remember promises made but then forgotten, that we try and revive compassion and empathy, the very reasons for which a man decided almost a century ago to shed his wants and only live by his needs. Will the wooden slippers bought at an astronomical price remind us of the millions of little feet that still walk without shoes? Sadly I do not think that will happen, soon the news of Gandhi’s legacy will be overtaken by some other and our minute memory will fail us one again!
I myself discovered Gandhi rather late in life. For the better part of my life he remained a romantic notion painted by a passionate mom. It was only lately that I understood his true message: to look for alternatives to any situation till you overcome and win. That is what I have tried to do since and I must admit that the formula works. It is a simple one and can be resumed in Bapu’s own words: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 7, 2009 | Uncategorized
Shashikant topped his school in the class X pre-boards. He was awarded a prize by the Delhi Government and received it yesterday. Shashikant has been a student of project why for some time and we always knew that he would do us proud one day.
A shy and reserved boy, Shashikant has always been very serious about his studies. He is your proverbial slumdog as he lives in a tiny hovel in the Govindpiri slums. His father is a bus driver and his mom a simple housewife. But unlike other families, his parents did not have many children. They perhaps knew that the future of their progeny lay in giving them a sound education. Shashikant has only one sibling.
Shashikant and many other students of the pwhy secondary programme have been performing extremely well in the past years. Recently one of our class XI boys got 99% in maths and many often top their respective schools each time there is a test of an examination. Wonder why? Well the recipe for success is simple and yet foolproof. Take a bunch of children from deprived homes and add a committed, passionate and dedicated teacher from a similar background whose only obsession in life is to ensure that his students shine, keep the two together in a classroom for a few hours a day and a few years and voila the topper is ready. We have tested this recipe for many years now and have never been disappointed. The secondary Sir – aka Naresh – is one of his kind!
And to say that it all began on a road side almost ten years ago. What a journey it has been! Why then is my joy filed with a tinge of sadness. Perhaps because we at project why can at best taken a 100 or so kids at a given time. What about the millions who will never get a chance at proving who they are or what they are capable of, those who will never enter the portal of a school or will simply quietly and unobtrusively drop our along the way because someone has hijacked the promises made to them.
by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 6, 2009 | Uncategorized
pwhy @ 1K is no arcane formula or cryptic code. It is simply the result of the latest headcount of the project why family. Amazing is it not?
It is the time of the year when one has to begin thinking of annual reports and balance sheets, and thus the time of the year when one asks for recent demographics and statistics. And to my utter astonishment they added up to a little under 1K. Yes the project family now has almost a thousand members. Wow! It has taken less than a decade to reach te magic figure.
What takes my breath away is that it all happened quietly and without much ado. One child after the other, one centre after the other, one dream after the other. True there were obstacles and challenges, some even mind boggling but they pale in front of the achievements and successes.
Allow me to give you a glimpse of the pwhy family at this very moment. As I write these words, there are children sitting for their dreaded board examinations, others preparing for their end year tests. There are little ones about to leave the prep class and live their first day in a big school and there are women about to complete their courses and begin their journey as earning members of their family. A bunch of special children are putting the last touches on the wall painting they have created in their classroom with the help of their volunteer pal Flore and tiny tots are on the verge of performing their first French song courtesy Caroline. And keeping them all safe and secure in a motley crew of teachers whose common denominator is their commitment and passion for the work they do. And all this adds up to the 1k souls under the pwhy umbrella!
by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 3, 2009 | manu
We humans love having an escape route at all times. It allows us to get out of situations that could become uncomfortable, or leaves us the option of changing pour minds without feeling shamefaced. Such escape routes are often vague and poorly defined notions and yet they do the trick when used.
The latest one is recession. Today everything is being validated by the simple use of the word recession. Even those who do not quite know what it means manage to hurl the word at your face in sometimes quite ludicrous ways. I am not in anyway suggesting that things are tickety-boo and that all is well around us. Far from that.
My heart goes out to those who have got pink slips and those living with the fear of losing their jobs. I understand the despair of those who gambled on the stock markets and lost. I feel the pain of those unable to pay their mortgages and who live with the fear of seeing themselves without a roof on their heads. These are real situations. What I am referring to is the unreal ones where people use recession as a possible escape route for the future; when people bluntly tell you that they may not be able to meet their paltry commitments in the future because of recession. What irks me no end is the general attitude of gloom that we all sink in rather than try and analyse why things turned from bad to worse, why we did not see it coming, and above all whether we are responsible for them in anyway. No we simply seem to be grateful for having found a way to explain our own inadequacies.
I was horrified when some time back I heard a young couple take a huge loan to go on holiday to some exotic destination. Both had landed themselves grossly overpaid jobs and though they were still on probation but the hubris was such, that they felt secure and safe. I would have thought that the collapse of things would have got us to soul search and redefine our lives rather than hold our heads and mumble the word recession ad nauseum. I would also have liked to hope that the situation we all find ourselves in would have made us look at life through different glasses and retrieve the lost values that withstand the test of times for the crisis we face is a moral one.
If we think about it, what is it that sends us chasing impossible dreams: a feeling of emptiness that we need to fill. For the past decades we have been trying to fill it with material things and our greed was such that we did not see the writing on the wall and the debt trap we were getting caught in. When the house of cards came tumbling down we were again faced with a huge void.
It is time to fill this void and this time to do it wisely. Perhaps it is time to assess what our needs are and ensure that we do not confuse them with our wants. And then if there is still a huge hole we need to fill, let us try and fill it with the right things, the ones that withstand all storms. I am not pontificating. There was a time when I too sought escape routes and material pursuits to fill the gaping holes of my life. I was lucky to stop in time as I stumbled upon one who did not have the luxury to dream of wants or needs but simply held on to life: Manu. The rest is history. I had found the road to my grail and the way to fill all the holes in my life. I did not need any more escape routes.
So life in the times of recession means holding on to the dreams of many souls and ensure that they do not die.
