up for adoption

I guess you  also remember Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and her Children . I somewhat get reminded of it at my darkest moments with visions of pulling a cart with not much left and in happier moments I am the old woman living in a shoe with all my project why children. You guessed right: the one up for adoption is me:)

Almost a decade and a half ago I moved from the comfort of my home to the proverbial old woman’s shoe, that in my case went from a red plastic stool on the roadside, to a small table in a mud hut adjacent to a slum pig slaughtering house; to a bench in a patch of dirt, to a mat under a tree, and finally to a table in a third floor room with a tin roof. With every move there were more children till we reached a century and now a thousand or so. Force Majeure made me have to physically leave my shoe, but I carry all of them in my heart and know that I carry their fragile dreams too.

For the past decade I have been aware of the fact that just like the little Prince and his Rose, I am responsible for all these little souls and unlike the Little prince who simply has to give up his body to reach his Rose, when I give up mine, the precious dreams will be orphaned unless I secure their moorings against all storms.

I can see with utmost honesty that I have tried many options but each one failed, some because they did not make good business sense, as even dreams require money to be fulfilled. The one option that made good business sense, namely Planet Why, did not find any takers for the seed money. The amount required had too many zeroes attached to it!

The past year has been difficult. Almost exactly a year ago my life stopped for an intense moment. My husband had cancer! For a few seconds I felt life ebbing out me and a sense of utter loss. But in that nano instant I knew that only I could set the tone for the days to come and if I was to save everything dear to me, I had to keep my chin up even if I was breaking inside. I did and one year down the line the husband is back on his feet and everyone except me seem to have forgotten where we came from. Only I live with the constant fear of the crab crawling back into our lives.

During this year that I had to place in parenthesises, I had a lot of time to think of all the not so nice things that sat on my bucket list, as the illness of your partner highlights your own vulnerability. The only image that haunted me was that of my project why children and team. The existence of this vibrant project was tenuous and depended on the now tired shoulders of a woman whose spirit was on the wane.

I know I will not give up. I never do! But sometimes I really get mad and frustrated when people who have deep pockets are willing to throw their money on good looking projects that will win them awards and media kudos but will not change anything on the ground and will not listen to reason as they always know better.

I wish someone took pity on me and reached out to us. I really am up for adoption but come with my bunch of kids in a shoe or in cart depending on the mood I am in.

The buffalo and the jackfruit. Sounds like a Panchatantra tale or a La Fontaine fable. Not quite. One could call it a tale of a fable but not of yore times but of India today! In February the entire police force of a district of biggest State in India went into a tizzy. The reason: seven buffaloes belonging to a political bigwig were apparently missing. Within minutes of the theft being reported, the whole police hierarchy sprung into action. Even sniffer dogs joined the search. The more the merrier! The buffaloes were found seven months later.

Yesterday or is it the day before it was the turn of two jackfruits were ‘stolen’ from the Delhi residence of a Member of Parliament. As soon as the call was received, a police posse with a team of the finger print bureau arrived in a jiffy. It aspired that two jackfruits were missing from the jackfruit tree. There were nine at night and seven in the morning. I guess the politician counts his fruit every night. Unlike buffaloes, jackfruit can be chipped and eaten in no time and probably have turned into poop by now. No one would keep them rotting for the cops to find and anyway being jackfruit season how on earth can you identify one from another. I wonder how the police will solve this one. They are waiting for forensic results and the poor staff must be under the scanner.

The two stories made headline news of course. Oh darling this is India! And the jackfruit story is nowhere ended. I hope some poor kid is not nabbed so that the case can be closed. As I write these words a police team is on the job.

These stories raise many issues. In a country where so many crimes remain unsolved because of the paucity of police personnel, where a city like Delhi has one cop for 671 citizens, it is absurd that more than ten cops are busy looking for two miserly jackfruit that are surely digested by now. They should just hand the MP two jackfruits and be done with it, but the man is a Shylock and will want his pound of flesh in the form of a culprit to punish I guess. Why did the man just not let this go. the fruits must have been stolen to be eaten by someone who must have been hungry. Now the whole affair has been given a security angle and this is serious matter. But I ask, what about the security of the common man who gets you elected and puts you in a sprawling bungalow in a city when many live in black holes!

This is again a case of two Indias where in one children go missing and the Police refuses to file an FIR and another India where two humble jackpots have all the sleuths on their toes. Sadly this is a reality we have learnt to live with and even accept. I wonder how ‘we’ react at a news item such as this. Smile! Sneer! Or simply move on without a thought. Actually we are the so called educated have turned into tortoises who conveniently slink in our carcasses when we are most needed. That two darned jackfruits should create such a shindy is unacceptable in a country where girls are raped, thousands of children die of malnutrition and millions sleep hungry. It is probably a bunch of kids who scaled the wall of the bereaved MP and stole them. Maybe they were hungry. Maybe they could not bear their mother’s despair, or maybe simply being children they felt like eating JACKFRUIT! I remember sneaking into the neighbour’s house with my cousins to ‘steal’ a mango or two. My nana’s garden had its own mango tree but somehow the forbidden one tasted better.

Is it not time we found her voices and raised our concern over such perry matters. Come to think of it all the salaries of all the men on khaki examining foot and fingerprints are paid with our damn money and if I have no objection in them spending time looking for a rapist or a kidnapper, I certainly am livid when they spend my hard earned money looking for a piece of crap, as those two jackfruits have by nod turned into shit.

And talking of human excreta, I found a delightful story while researching for this blog that should make us sing the praises of the JACKFRUIT! Did you know that the biggest contribution of this underrated fruit is, guess what, to the Indian Railways. It was because of this humble fruit that toilets were introduced on trains in India. This is recorded history. Don’t believe me then click here!

For the past week I have been knee deep – figuratively – in poo! It all started when some time back a wannabe philanthropist who landed in my life via the pristine greens of the Delhi Golf Course courtesy the husband, informed me of his desire to bring about what would be called at best a poo revolution. He wanted to build 5* toilets across the land, specially for women. It is true toilets and women have of late been connected for the worst reasons possible: rape, following the horrific rape of two teen age cousins. So every one wants to build loos. I second that whole heartedly and hope that the dream of every home in India having access to a toilet become reality and keeping in mind the magnitude of the problem the more the merrier.

In a brillant Ted Talk, Rose George talks about crap seriously. I urge you find 14 minutes to listen to this talk. The figure are staggering and shocking for the likes of us who take a clean, flushable and modern toilet for granted. More than 40% of the world population defecate in the open. 620 million in India still defecate in the open. And it is not simply a women safety issue, the consequences of this open defecation is mind boggling. 50 known diseases travel in human shit. Open defecation is one of the important contributors to malnutrition, and malnutrition, as my regular followers should know by now, is the cause of 5000 children under 5 dying EVERY DAY. So toilets suddenly acquire a whole new momentousness. In a recent study, UNICEF suggest that open defecation is an important threat to human capital of developing countries and a sanitation programme which includes hand washing can reduce diarrhoeal diseases by over 40 per cent and respiratory infections by 30 per cent. Diarrhoea and respiratory infections are the number one cause for child deaths in India. So talking of poop becomes serious business.

But let us come back to my philanthropist whom I met last week and his vision of toilets. Like many he has good intentions but scant knowledge of the reality on the ground. I was somewhat like that 15 decades ago when I started pwhy but was saved by the intuitive decision of only surrounding myself with people from within the community pwhy worked with. I also saw the good sense of listening to them and quickly and quietly burying my highfalutin ideas! Probably the one sensible decision I took.   Had I gone my way, pwhy would have been dead and buried by now. But let us get back on track. The ‘vision’ that was revealed to me over sips of single malt, was over the top and doomed to fail were it to begin. I listened patiently to the man who told me he had done a study and selected the best ‘model’ and wanted women to have a 5* loo experience. We are of course talking of urban slum and rural women who defecate in the open. The model was the one that had got the first price in a recent competition organised by known philanthropists. I heard him patiently and at the end of it all I thought I would share my lifetime sensible decision with him, hoping he would accept it. I simply asked him if he had even been to an urban slum and talked to actual and potential users. I thought I had exceeded my ‘brief’ but was relieved and excited when he accepted and promptly took down my number. I must admit I though he would never call, but call he did.

Yesterday afternoon, under a blistering sun we drove in a swanky car to our Okhla centre where in spite of it being past school time, the staff and some children were waiting for us. After a quick visit to our centre that was sizzling under its tin roof but where students and teachers including a volunteer from the US were busy learning, I asked my staff to take him for a pooh walk. It meant visiting ‘homes’ and whatever toilet facility existed in the area. David, our very own Boston volunteer, decided to take him to visit one his student’s home. The ‘home’ in question was a sunk in space barely 20sq feet with a tin roof where 6 people lived! There was noway in the world one could place a toilet in this ‘home’, let alone a starred one!

Next stop the communal toilet block built by the Municipal Corporation. When we had begun our work some 8 years back this block was built but locked. We badgered the local politicos and the block was made functional. This block cater to 4  camps or 1500 people. It has about 10 toilet cubicles for mean and 10 for women. At any given time at least 2 to 4 are unusable because of being blocked. There is poop everywhere and the smell is nauseating. Users have to pay 1 to 2 rupees per use. In a large family it makes a substantial amount per month! In the evening and night women feel unsafe as the place is then surrounded by drunks and anyway at 10pm the place is closed. The maintenance is sub contracted and the contract often given by the local politician to one of his sidekicks. He in turn ’employs’ someone who collects the usage money as salary! The place is ‘cleaned’ by water only. When there is no water the place is simply closed!

I need not say more for you to realise that a large number of these 1500 citizens of this city are forced to defecate in the open. One of the favoured place is the railway line you see in the picture. This poop tour that had begun in a somewhat light mood suddenly become another deafening scream and a grim reality check. I found myself in a time warp, and was again standing on a road in the blistering summer of 2000 where Manu let out his heart wrenching cry that seared my soul and changed my life. I was never the same again.

David and the Okhla girls

Seeing the abysmal and unacceptable state of the public toilet located a stone’s throw from my very own centre was a rude wake up call. Had I sunk into such a comfort zone that I had become impervious to the needs of my children? Was it sufficient to gloat over glowing report cards and beaming smiles? I felt very small. Why had I never asked myself how these wonderful children who have made me so proud and brought indescribable joy into my life survived day after day, where they went to the loo at night, where they bathed. The questions are endless and as each one comes into my mind I feel that much smaller. I felt the old Anou come alive again.

I had thought that there would be no more poop tourism. Far from that. The next day another call from the same gentleman and more visits to the loos of Delhi. You can get inured to many things in this land of ours but the state of the toilets in the Khader Resettlement Colony and the Govindpuri slums were horrific and vile. I do not think there are sufficient adjectives to define the experience. In one of the books at Madanpur Khader JJ Resettlement Colony there were three community toilets: the first was locked but the stench was nauseating to say the least, and the reason for it being locked was that the person in charge had gone to lunch. Quite understandable as no one whose sense of smell is alive could eat in that place. The second one was locked and a peek into it showed us that it has been locked for years and completely plundered of every and anything possible. What remained was a carcass!

The last toilet block was in use. It was the pits. Many toilets were clogged, the stench of urine and poop was foul, there was poop all over the place and more where they should be none. In that filth a woman stood in silence with three young children. I do not know how she could bear the stench but I guess humans are tough birds and get used to the worst if it is a matter of survival. I discovered later that she was the wife of the man who had been given the ‘charge’ of maintaining the public conveniences. These toilets were apparently built before the arrival of the resettlement colony inhabitants. Many of these are from the Nehru Place and Alaknanda slums. They were given between 20 and 12 square yards of land upon producing a token that had been distributed in the V.P. Singh regime and paying 7000 Rs. The state of the community loos was such that in spite of the minuscule plot of land, most of the residents built a ‘toilet’ some on the roof that you accede via a precarious staircase and making you wonder how old or disabled people poop. It is also evident that it is only the poorest people who cannot afford to build a toilet that have to visit the communal loos.

It is no wonder that the maintenance is so poor. We met the man in ‘charge’. A tired looking thin man who seemed to carry the burden of the world on his frail shoulders. In seems that the blocks are built on a supposedly and ludicrous sustainable model as the in charge only gets to keep the money collected from usage 1 to 2 rupees. In that he has not only to feed hid family but keep the loos clean. He is given nothing: no broom, no pail, no disinfectant, no floor cleaner, no soap- nothing! Normally it is a jet of water, if water there is, that is meant to do the job. No only that, not all people pay. Some get so violent that the poor man has been beaten more than once. A woman goon even slaps him every night as he refused to pay her a 20 rs a day commission. On a good day he makes 150 rupees.

No wonder the loos are in such a bad shape!

The Govindpuri slums were worse. Two blocks located outside the slums as there is no space inside. The state of the loos was unmentionable and poor Dharmendra had to forego hind lunch and dinner as he was the ‘chosen’ one to go in and take pictures. These slums have five blocks fro A to E and each has an average of 500 homes. @ of 5 people per home it means 2500 persons have access to 2 blocks. Come evenings and no one can venture there as the watering holes are close and the drunks a plenty. Wonder where people go.

The question that comes to mind is what is the solution and that is where one is lost. Giving people toilets does not in anyway ensure that these will be kept cleaned and used in a responsible manner. This has been amply proved by now. So upgrading facilities makes no sense if one does not run aggressive awareness campaigns and hope that the penny drops.

In her Ted Talk, Rose George shares an experiment that worked in villages in India. Two identical plates were place at a short distance: one was filled with good food and the other with human excreta!  People sat around and watched. Soon flies appeared and merely went from one plate to the other, as flies cannot differentiate between poop and food. As the flies executed their dance, people looked mesmerised till the penny dropped. There is crap everywhere and open food carts in proximity so what I may be eating is someone else’s shit! That was a big no no! Toilets were made pronto.

So what is needed is a campaign where one can make people aware of defecating in the open and this can only been done with everyone on board. In a city it means the local biggies, the women, men and children of course but also the goons and drunks! No easy task. Needs to be tried otherwise you could  build the best loos in the world. In no time they would become unusable.

But it needs to be done if we want the 5000 deaths a day to stop.

One thing that the a appointment of a young, feisty, articulate and gutsy woman as our Education Minister has done is given many the motivation to share their views on how to heal our moribund education system. Almost every day one sees articles, opinions, columns, edits and more with suggestions on how to improve education in India. Recently I read one such article entitled the The educated illiterate! An oxymoron many would say. But not quite and I speak with experience as for the past decade and a half I have successfully run project why which such educated illeterates. But this is not the subject of this post.

The subject I guess would be my adding my two penny worth in the debate. I must admit I am a little disturbed by the content of the articles and even the suggestions emanating from the corridors of power. It seems that every one is ‘hung’ up on higher education, creating new IIMs and IITs, allowing Ivy league and other universities of standing to set up campuses in India. A little bird has also let out that our new Minister is contemplating revising text books.

The article I mention poses a pertinent question and gives the required answer: Does she want more graduates or does she want better skills? If she wants Narendra Modi’s promise to Young India to be fulfilled, she will have to create a regime for apprenticeships and on-the-job training to improve employability. This is something I have been debating for long: the need of introducing skill imparting courses that are in sync with the employment market as early as class VIII. The French model of Bac en alternance is a good one. A child who is not incline towards academics can chose this option where s/he attends school for 3 days and works as an apprentice for the other 3. The jobs one can think of are: tailors, hairdressers, beauticians, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, masons, salespersons in malls and supermarkets, repairing refrigerators, air conditioners etc. Finding teachers would not be a problem if one is willing to overlook formal education. I hope our Minister would.

I also agree with the author when she says that we should increase the number of doctors that graduate each year. I was shocked to learn that whereas 1.5 million engineers graduate a year but only 35,000 doctors do so. So maybe we need more medical colleges than IITs!

But let us get back to my concern. Everyone seems to be talking about higher education but in the present situation higher education of the kind mentioned is only available to the privileged few who have money and intellectual ability. For me education is Education for ALL and in the present situation higher education is a pipe dream for millions and millions of children in India.

To ensure that every child who has the intellectual ability –  you cannot begin to imagine how many do – all state and government run schools should impart quality education akin to the one imparted in Central schools also run by the state government for children of parents employed in government institutions. What is the good for the goose in not for the gander!

Education for ALL means that every child born in this country should be given the enabling environment to aspire to any higher education institution whatever her/his caste, faith, social profile. This is what we do at project why with very limited resources and quite successfully. Rohit came to us when he was 9! In July they will be joining college. No big deal, many would say, but that is not the case at all. Rohit is a student of our Okhla centre, a centre we erected in a reclaimed garbage dump, in an area where the closest school is miles away, parents work long hours and children were easy prey for drug pedlars and thieving gangs. Had we not decided to set up this centre in spite of the initial resentment of the local mafias and borne their slings and arrows, Rohit would have been one of the 90% of children of the area that do not complete high school. He may have become a gang leader, like many boys like him. Yet all it took to ‘save’ him was a handful of committed educated illeterates, 4 bamboos and a blue plastic sheet to make all the difference.

So what do we do under the blue plastic sheet and the 4 bamboos? No rocket science. We just do what all schools should do: create an enabling environment for the child to blossom, teach the curriculum that is not taught in schools as it should, smother the child with love and understanding, believe in her/him and try and find her/his abilities and open the world to her/him with creative activities and contact with persons from different part of the world. No big deal! All you need is a heart.

Rohit may not have made it to an IIM or IIT but he certainly has broken the circle of poverty in which he was born with a little help from his project why friends.

This could be a reality for every child if schools ran as they should. Everyone feels that one of the problems is bad teachers. I disagree with them as all the people who make my Team would qualify as ‘bad’ teachers in normal circumstances. Yet year after year they have ensured that ALL project why children finish school. I am sure that all the so called bad teachers can be turned to ‘good’ teachers if one taught them to see with their hearts. True we need ‘good’ teachers but here again the definition of ‘good’ should not be based on certificate and degrees but on a desire to learn and teach.

I remember having joined the French Department of JNU at the age of 22 as Assistant Professor and having done all my education in French was handed over MA students and given the courses no one else wanted: Medieval Literature and Scientific Translation. Some of my students were older than me and some were very leftist in their thought. I was put to test on the first day when one of them asked me a question he knew I did not know. I smiled and told him that I did not know the answer and would find it by the next time – not an easy task in  BG ( before Google) days! I knew I had passed the test and from that day onwards I never had a problem with my students. I had simply been honest!

To circumvent the bad teacher problem and give kids ‘better teachers’ the author of the article suggest technology. She writes: The finest minds have been working on the dissemination of $30 tablets that can be distributed far and wide if there is a will. Can she succeed where Sibal failed? Tech star Vivek Wadhwa believes accelerating the pace of technology adoption is the only solution because teachers cannot be trained and put into place fast enough. On line curriculum can be created and tablets pre-loaded with instructions and video conferencing capabilities can be rolled out within months. Irani, he believes, should give every child a tablet within a year.

I do not quite agree as what looks good on paper does not always work on the field. My first reaction is more on the negative side but am willing to give it a thought.

What I would like our Minister to do is take some simple measures even of they are not in sync with policies and educationists. I would first of all like to see the pass percentage across the Board raised to 50%, the no fail till class VII policy abolished and free education extended from 14 years to 18. This would make a world of difference to the underprivileged and poor children. Before I explain why let me just inform you that the poorest of the poor children have no other option than the local state run school. When the Right to Education was made law, instead of going for the option of improving the and upgrading existing state run schools, the policy makers came up with the absurd 25% reservation for economically weaker sections in all public schools. I do not when we will free ourselves from the shackles of ‘reservation’, an idea mooted with good intent but hijacked by political parties to suit their wily ends. A government that would do away with reservation in all categories would truly free India. The only reservation that is acceptable is the one for economically weak sections irrespective of their caste, creed etc and that too for one generation. Give weaker children extra support in all ways imaginable in school but allow them to fight their further battles on a level playing ground.

I would like someone to do an audit of the children who have benefited from the EWS category in public schools. They will be surprised to see that there few if any really poor children. This reservation had been hijacked by the middle class who are manipulative and can forge all documents needed to meet the requirements of the reservation. The poor children still attend overcrowded state run schools if at all. Unless these schools are improved education in the true sense will remain a dream for those who aspire to be doctors or engineers. You cannot imagine how many bright little faces promptly answer: doctor when asked what they would like to be. I am sure they would make doctors Hippocrates would be proud of.

Today with the no fail till class VIII policy you have children who can barely read or write after sitting year after year in overcrowded classes. We have had such kids come to us and believe you me, within a year of regular support they make up for all true lost years and even become toppers. The no fail policy may work well in public schools that have their own system of internal evaluation and where teachers are held responsible for the performance of the children in their classes, government school teachers who are paid much better salaries but also have connections in the right places, know that they will not lose their jobs easily. Should there be a complaint – a rare occurrence when most of the parents are literate or at best semi literate – they get away with a transfer or a few days suspension. The no fail policy makes them even more lackadaisical and they do not feel the need to teach. Remember 33% is all it needs. I had one senior secondary school principal tell me that they never teach more than 40% of the syllabus. A nice way of slamming all doors shut for these children. One really needs to review these policies in the light of the actual situation on the field.

Lastly I think it is also time we changed the the 6 to 14 free education policy. Education should be till the end of school and that is 18.

Will any one listen.

Come May and Maam’ji starts dreading the holiday homework saga. It is a biannual epic in numerous acts with two main protagonists: Utpal and his Maam’ji a.k.a me! It has many props: copybooks, charts, all kinds of stationery ware and more. The two yearly performances are unpredictable and can go from dramatic to melodramatic and even tragic. It is a surprise package that the unwilling spectators – people living under my roof – are compelled to witness.

Holiday homework in Indian schools is always voluminous and sometimes quite inane making one wonder how it helps children better themselves. I am often amused at the opening paragraph of holiday homework sheets that extols the ‘virtues’ of holiday homework as something fun while also highlighting the importance of visiting other places. Now you are supposed to do all of it. I wonder if the teachers who plan the homework have actually sat down and done it to see how much time it takes, keeping in mind that the child on vacation and at home is not the compliant kid within the precinct of a school.

I remember one year when Utpal had to make Roman Numeral Charts from I to C with matchsticks. It was a nightmare as even I was not able to do it. We had to dip into the pwhy pool of skills to be able to finally make them. Now holiday home work looks something like this in all subjects: revised chapters X to Y;  prepare worksheets for unit test X; make x number of charts,  x number of models; do x number of experiments; write a page each day; cut newspapers articles; visit x shop and write your experience etc. Tires me even reading it and let me tell you no child under 12 can do it by himself.

This time Utpal stayed in school for a study camp and I was hoping against hope that most of the homework would have been completed in the 5 weeks camp. I even sled his academic in charge who informed me that most of it would be done. So my stress levels were lower till the day he arrived with the homework and lo and behold though he seemed to have done the revision and copy work, all the rest was waiting or me. How could our saga not be enacted in its summer 2014 version and how could my summer be complete without the homework epic.

It turned out harder than ever as this time, Utpal having come home later Agastya was already here! Last year I had been able to use the Agastya handle to push Utpal as he too wanted to be free for Agastya and version 2013 turned out to be a good stress buster for me!

Version 2014 is quite the opposite. The mercury is soaring and the heat is on in more ways than one. My nerves have been ‘on test’ since many months and are on edge. Utpal feels he has earned his holiday after an extra five weeks at school and he is spot on. Yet the homework looms on our head and it is a bataille royale every morning and evening. I have prepared all the material but only Utpal can write what needs to be written.

Over the years I have remarked that Utpal uses the holiday homework to test me and he does believe me. This time as we had to meet his psychiatrist as we are hoping to taper out his medication, I shared this problem with him. He just smiled and told me that this would happen as I was the only constant in his life and he needed to reassert his place in my heart. Children being clever, he had found my Achilles tendon. This would continue till he grew up in his head and felt safe without the need of having recourse to challenging behaviour. Dr G told me to find a strategy and that I could even resort to incentives if that worked. It is only when Utpal feels secure that he will stop.

Dr G went on to explain that every meaningful relationship needs to be put to the test and we constantly do so in life, often without realising it. Come to think of it this is very true and almost surreptitious.

Most of us have several meaningful family relationships whereas Utpal has just one. I will just have to play along.

So this version of the saga will be done as patiently and indulgently as possible and I hope we both survive it with a smile.