The Skype call came spot on at 6 am. The husband picked it up as usual and the little chap came on the screen. But this morning there was no usual banter with the grandpa. What I hears was : I need to talk business with Nani! So Nani promptly placed her face in front of the camera wondering what business had to be discussed. I was sure that it would be something related to his birthday, perhaps an extra toy or book in the parcel ready to leave as he celebrates his sixth on the 21st. Well I got it partly right as it was about his birthday, but totally wrong after that. What he said next totally floored me: Nani, I am not getting any toys for my birthday this year, and am sending all the money to Project Why children. Wow! Was I zapped. It transpired that this year all his friends’ parents were told not to buy him any toys but to make a donation to project why.

I cannot begin to describe all the emotions that filled me in that short instant. I was overwhelmed with love, gratitude, pride and above all respect and admiration for my daughter and son-in-law who have been able to teach my lovely grandson the art of seeing with your heart.

Agastya knows project why well. When he was just 8 months or so, we had a play group that use to come and play with him at home every day. It was a small bunch of our creche children with one teacher. A few months later he was ‘enrolled’ in the project why creche and attended it each and every time he was in Delhi. His first pals were project why kids. And today it is with them that he wants to share his birthday, even though he is 12415 kilometres away. True he will have a party with a birthday cake and birthday games, but there will be no presents but the joy of sharing this day with children who have less than him is priceless. I saw that in his little face this morning. Needless to say the parcel grandma sends will have a few more toys then initially planned.

More than the little fellow, it his parents who need to be applauded. We all wonder why today’s youth is not compassionate and sensitive, particularly in India. The answer is simple. They are/were never taught to be so. And yet that is the biggest lesson you can give your child. But the only way to give it walk the talk.

Blissfully there are some rare parents who do so. We have a little girl who is 13 now, who has been celebrating her birthday every year with our special section children. This of course is because her mom decided to do so when she was 1, and has never stopped. Every year in February, the special section is taken to Dilli Haat and fed a scrumptious lunch of their choice before cutting a nice creamy cake. Games are organised amidst laughter and fun and each child gets a lovely return gift. I wish more parents did the same. It is not the fact of donating something as some do, but of spending time together that makes all the difference. The children my grandson is sending ‘gifts’ to, are children he has played and bonded with.

Today I am a proud mom and grand mom. 

Opened the paper this morning to this head line: Cops mull DNA testing of Delhi’s beggars. As I had written in yesterday’s blog, the plight of beggar children was in the news on day 1 of year 2015! And this from the High Court of our city! So it was not surprising that a day later we are made privy to the fact that the Delhi police is drawing up a plan to conduct DNA tests on people begging on the streets with children, to find out it these kids were their own or had been abducted and trafficked. We are informed that this idea was sent to the Prime Minister’s office by a citizen  who found that women were often found begging with children in their laps who did not resemble them. Though this may sound a great idea, it is in fact a knee jerk reaction to a monumental problem: child beggars. The concerned citizen seems to accept child beggars if they ‘resemble’ their mother, or so it sounds. I am willing to give the person the benefit of the doubt and applaud the fact that he or she found his or her voice and took a step in the right direction. On the other hand I am a little weary of the rapidity with which the suggestion was passed to the Chief of Police. We all know that whatever comes from the hallowed PMO is never viewed as a ‘suggestion’ but as a ‘directive’ and without weighing the pros and cons of the said suggestion ‘orders’ must have been passed in haste. It however seems that some sense as prevailed as the legality of such tests is being weighed.

If the concerned citizen was disturbed by the sight of a child begging, then he or she should have not stopped at the mother child issue, but express anguish over all children who beg. The way this idea sounds is that if the child belongs to the beggar woman, then it is all kosher.  But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Before I go any further, I would just like to be the Devil’s advocate and reiterate the comment of an activist on the DNA testing idea:“What if a woman claims to have found a homeless child? There are hundreds of cases where a woman beggar adopts the child of a fellow beggar after she dies. What action can be taken against them?”  

Child beggars are a blot on our society more so because, as is the case in any business, if there was no demand there would be no supply. It is because people give, and give abundantly, that beggary in any form thrives. 

As to the question of legality of the DNA testing, I tend to argue that everyone born in this country is protected by the same rights, and as such testing are done on a court order and mostly with the person’s consent, the very idea of forced testing simply because you are carrying a child that someone feels does not resemble you, seems absurd!

We should be outraged by children begging, yet we have learnt to live with it, finding our own coping strategies: tinted car glasses for some, looking away for others or rolling down your car window and handing out a doing without looking at the child. And we have been doing so unabashedly thus allowing beggary to become a lucrative business.

We should be incensed everyone every time we see a little hand proffered in our direction. The solution is not to remove them and throw them outside the city limits as was done during the famed Commonwealth Games. The problem of children begging has to taken head on. The government is accountable for the protection of all children and their are many laws that enacted for the same. 

Stopping children begging is not simply counting them and parking them somewhere, away from public glare. They need to be given their rights: to education, to food, to shelter and to childhood. We can barely look after our mentally challenged children and our orphans and we all know the terrible conditions of state run institutions. So what do you do after a DNA test tells you that the child is not the child of the woman carrying her. Where do you take the child, who looks after it and ensures its care.

You may want to believe it or not, beggar mothers do care for their children in the best way possible and unless we can provide adequate care, we should not embark on some hair brained programme that may do more harm than good.

I have always called Project Why, my magnum opus and my swan song, and often at the close of each year I found myself wondering whether these two images do really hold true. With age catching up and time flying at an unstoppable speed, pwhy is definitely my swan song. The question is whether  the final curtain call will be a success or not.

When I look back at the wonderful journey that began 15 years ago, I have no doubt in saying that in spite of some choppy seas, and even some terrible storms, our ship sailed on course and we were able to fulfil what is known in NGO parlance as ones ‘mission’. I do not know how many mission statements I have had to write, and perhaps as we are an organic organisation, there would have been some variants but the real mission, the one that stemmed from the depth of my soul and my heart and was probably never stated, has been the one that has propelled my sails. Project Why was meant to be my way of paying back a debt I have always felt I owed. Privileges that came my way because one day a man sailed on a slave ship and set roots in another land enabled me to be to the manor born; the privileges that came my way because a woman decided not to marry so as to not give birth to a child in an enslaved country and because two wonderful souls that took almost four decades to meet, decided that their child who was born and who grew up in foreign lands would be as passionate about India as they were; and above all because what I saw when I returned to a land I had only seen through the eyes of my parents was not the one I had dreamt of. Something was terribly wrong. But even to get to the moment I could open the eyes of my heart took many years of being so wrapped up in career and family.

The demise of those who had taught me everything and years of locking myself in my grief made  my world darker and darker to the point when I saw and felt nothing at all. It would take a broken beggar and his heart wrenching cries to jolt me out of my inertia and open the eyes of my heart. But more than that to steer me on the way of paying back that debt!

Fifteen years later I do not know where I have reached in this long journey. I guess that I can never pay back the entire debt in the short time I have at my disposal. But a tiny part of it has been paid in the small achievements we have realised: be it the fact that the beggar lived and died loved and cared for, that a little scalded little boy every one had given up on is now a young teenager; that so many children who would have dropped out from school are now doing incredibly well; that a young boy born on the roadside is now an international ramp model. But most of all that a bunch of special children, the kind many shun, have a place where they can spend a few hours surrounded by love and laughter.

So does this allow me to call pwhy my magnum opus. I would like to believe so. More so because it has brought into my once lonely life a bouquet of wonderful souls from all over the world who have given me so much love and trust. I now have a family, my family, the project why family and its DNA is that every member sees with his or her heart.

But the journey has not ended. For pwhy to be my  magnum opus and swan song, I need to ensure that the future of this family is secured even after I take my last bow.

It is that time of the year when one writes a year end message, so here is my take!

2014 can best be described as a sabbatical year, when one took ‘leave’ from one’s customary work to review achievements and failures and take remedial measures where needed. It was also a year when we took stock of our strengths, identified our weaknesses. A true SWOT Analysis moment.

 2013 had been a year when my husband’s cancer compelled me to take a back seat and leave the project in the hands of my terrific staff. In hindsight this forced leave of mine was God sent as it impelled my staff to act as independently as possible as they did not want to ‘disturb’ me in any manner. So when earlier they would call at the drop of a hat if faced with a problem, they now looked for solutions independently and more often than not found one that bettered mine! Come to think of it, I did feel a little forgotten. All for a good cause though! This gave them increased confidence and validated yet again, my decision to employ people from within the community.

It was soon evident that the only lacuna was fund raising, a task I had appropriated for far too long and that had over the years taken on a distinct Anou imprint! The skills I used were unfortunately skills that one could not pass on to another. One could I teach my gift for the gab or my obsession with words! Fund raising was undoubtedly our biggest weakness and threatened our very existence and thus needed to be addressed urgently. The urgency was further heightened when we lost a large chunk of the monthly donation of one of our important donors. The reason for this reduction was the drop in tourism following the rape of a foreign national from the country of origin of our donor. This brought to the fore the fragility of our funding model and required some serious thinking.

It is true that most of our donations come from outside India as we have not been able to muster a donor base within India. This was not for want of trying as when Project Why was set up I had wanted to launch what I called a one-rupee-a-day campaign which enabled each and every one to be a donor. It was very naive of me, more so in a city like Delhi which seems to have lost the ability to see with its heart and who also found the one rupee idea infradig! The campaign was resuscitated a couple of times in years to come but always met with the same fate.

Many organisations get substantial funds from Corporates and Big Businesses, but this needs you to be Page 3 worthy, and a recluse like me was not up to the mark. Perhaps I should have polished my dancing shoes and got the war paint out! But that was not to be, so we had to walk another path and we did.

The husband’s cancer also made me realise the true meaning of the saying: Man proposes, God disposes. No one is eternal and the wise need to accept this indubitable fact and take the right decisions. It was time that fund raising was revisited in the light of the skills of those who would be carrying the torch forward.

Rani and Dharmendra attended a week long fund raising workshop and though they learnt many finer points, they were a little weary of some of the suggestions that either required substantial investment or sounded too impersonal and thus went against what Project Why stood for. They both agreed that getting a call centre to spout a sales pitch from a written text, without ever having see pwhy, was not what we stood for. It was back to the drawing board and the need to evolve an in house model that would sensitise people around us.

There is a God, one I have oft called God of Lesser Beings but now plan to rechristen God of Project Why, who watches from the wings and appears out of the blue to help us. The visit of a long time supporter and dear friend brought into our lives the till now elusive Corporates, but these were special: they saw with their heart. And that was not all. My one in many moons appearance at a diner saw me seated next to a young man who is also a honcho but again one who sees with his heart, and he too has promised to help. So we did find a backdoor entry into the hallowed corporate portals and I did not need my war paint and high heels. I hope and pray that this will be the miracle we longed for.

I cannot end this message without sharing the update on Planet Why! Many of you know of this sustainability dream of mine where we had hoped to build a green guesthouse the proceeds of which would have run Project Why. Many of you also know that though we were able to raise the money for the land, I was not able to secure the funds to build. Some time back we had begun thinking of selling the land that had appreciated substantially and purchase a smaller plot in the vicinity of our women centre as we are on the verge of losing our tenancy. Yet for the past year we have not been able to sell our land as the property rates have fallen. I wonder whether there is another reason for the obstacles that are coming our way in this matter. We will continue our efforts and wait for the opportune moment.

I just realised that this long message has not touched upon the day-to-day activities of the project. This is because every thing has been running like a clockwork orange and without a murmur. All examinations have been passed, all Boards cleared, outings organised, workshops conducted, visitors received, volunteers welcomed! Project Why runs almost on auto pilot. All I can say is Chapeau Bas to the children and the team!

We await 2015 with bated breath. May it bring new avenues, new hope and above all the answers we seek.


Anou
December 2014