Yesterday we had the Kikiristan Fanfare come play for our children. They were a merry band of 8 somewhat reminding me of Sergeant Pepper’s revisited. They played for our Okhla children and then for our very very Special children. The session with the Okhla  kids was great with the band members interacting with the children but what happened on the terrace of the special section was mind blowing and a one in a lifetime experience.

It all began with me asking Shalu whether she would dance with the band. I had no doubt that she would agree, as unlike us ‘normal’ people, special kids have no inhibitions. They simply follow their hearts. But nothing could have prepared me for what was to come.

I asked the band leader whether Shalu could dance with them and of course they agreed. Shalu went and took her place centre stage and broke into her dance. She danced with the band for over three minutes and to anyone who did not know the truth, it looked like a very well rehearsed bit and was mind blowing.

Shalu is incredible!

But that was not all. After the performance the children were invited to ‘try’ the instruments and it was heart warming how to see our little angels blow the big horn or try their hand at the drums. We were quite taken aback at Loveleen’s prowess at the drums and of course Munna trying to blow the horn was a unique moment.

The show was pure magic. The special kids and the French Fanfare: incredible project why.

My friend Saras runs a day care for disabled children and adults in Malaysia. Today she faces an eviction notice. The reason: two neighbours do not want the premisses to be used as a day care for special souls. My heart missed a beat when I heard this news as we too run a day care that is almost a clone to hers: in a residential area for children and adults between the age of 7 and 48. For them it is the only place where they can spend some hours being happy and accepted and loved and cared. It is the only place they can be who they are, and be appreciated for being who they are. In Saras’ case the applicants have suffered nuisance throughout the day from 8.30 am to 5pm, Monday to Friday as a result of intolerable noise made by the special children as well as their attendants and carers and nuisance of experiencing the uncomfortable sensation of seeing the disabilities and sufferings of all the special children, the whole day, day in day out.

I am speechless and do not know what to say to such people. My first thought would be to tell them that not to tempt the fates as a special child can be born in any family, even theirs. What world do they live in and how can seeing a special child be viewed as a nuisance. They are the most precious children in the world. Actually we are the ones who are truly disabled and challenged as we do not have the heart to accept anyone who is different. They open their hearts to each and everyone who has the guts and ability to look at them straight in their eyes. And once they accept you they never let you down as they know not what treachery or betrayal means. It is we, the so called abled who master these emotions.

I pray Saras can save her centre.

It is no mean task. I have battled many demons to keep our centre going and even then it is has not been easy. If things had happened as I wanted them to and had people reached out and opened their hearts and purses, then the little girl in this picture could have lived her life in dignity. Sadly, for want of funds, we had to shut our residential centre and were unable to raise the funds for our own building. Radha who suffers from brittle bone disease – osteogenis imperfecta – and lives in a dark damp hole with 7 other people, could have lived in a happy and safe place. For the past weeks she has not been able to come to our centre as our leg has festered and she may have to face amputation if gangrene sets in. It is too difficult and excruciatingly painful to take a bumpy auto rickshaw ride every day and be carried up three flight of stairs to our centre. We are helpless and can only bring her some support in her home, but can not fill it with sunlight or laughter.

All the very special souls who come to our day care, come from homes where they are not cared for and yes they are noisy, and yes they look different but they have come to this world the same way we have and are entitled to everything we have, if not more. But more than anything else, they need our love, our acceptance and our protection. They are the truly children of God and not being able to open our hearts to them in tantamount to shutting our door to God.

It is time we opened the doors of our hearts wide and unconditionally.

Saras we are with you in your fight.

For the past days I have been watching the shenanigans of our elected representatives with horror, sadness and shame. The democracy we hold so dear to our hearts and are so proud of looks like a joke when you see the behaviour of our august parliamentarians in the hallowed halls of parliament House. I am not going into the merits or demerits of any Bill in particular but simply highlighting how things happen. We all witnessed how our 49th state was created yesterday.You do not need to be a rocket scientist to understand the reasons for the rush in passing this Bill in an election year. Once again sleeping with the enemy was acceptable as every party wanted a share of the pie.

To my simple mind, the very fact that there were so much dissent to this bill, would have meant that it should be looked at again and not passed in a hurry behind closed doors while a technical or tactical glitch kept the drama away from the very people whose government you are meant to be. Once rushed through the lower house, the higher house spent a ‘day’ discussing it before again passing it. What we saw was people shouting, holding placards, and shouting some more. One has to ensure that Parliamentarians have a good pair of lungs! But jokes apart it all seem well orchestrated: you will shout, you will try and speak, and the chair will intersperse it all with a dose of ‘please sit down’ and the ultimate ‘the house is adjourned for 10 minutes’ and the whole thing repeated over and over again till the time everyone wants to have his evening drink and meal. Then the show changes mode and you go on to pass the bill by what they call voice vote. The punch line then is either the ayes or the noes who have it, have it, have it and voila the fate of millions is decided. Yesterday there were many moments when MPs were busy laughing or talking and never said there ayes and noes. It was all prearranged.

One would have thought that Parliament is where people discuss and amend bills. Not at all. It is where politics is played at an astronomical cost paid by you and me. There are over 130 bills pending and one day to pass them.

There is one day left. I wonder how many bills will be passed today. Will the Disabilities Bill be passed or are the disabled people not a good vote bank, and what about the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act to ease restrictions on use of opioids like morphine for pain management. Will it be passed or will the cancer patients be denied an easy death because our MPs are too busy garnering brownie points. 

Only time will tell.

circa 2013

2014

There has been a lot of talk on the importance of empowering women! One of our supposed PM candidate has been more than busy wooing women as suddenly the 49% of us seem to be good electoral fodder. India will not become a superpower if women aren’t given opportunities. We need equal representation for women at all levels to make them empowered he clamours for those willing to hear him. I again wonder why it has taken 6 decades to understand this, why bills linger for decades waiting to be discussed and passed. Let us not talk about rapes, rapists who sit in power, patriarchal kangaroo courts who dispose of lives of women they feel are custodians of their honour. And how can we forget women who lull their hungry children to sleep every night with promised they cannot keep. 

Forget about all this. Suddenly we the women of India have gained importance and are told that we must feel free and safe and wanted. I would love to know how this leader would achieve that and why no one felt the same way earlier. The 49% of us has been there from day one! So why did it take 66 years to realise that: India can’t be a superpower until we empower women. Wonder when that will happen.

Today I want to share with you two real stories of women’s empowerment that I have witnessed and even been a part of. When I decided to set up project why, I also decided to give a chance to those who were never given one and thus sourced my team from the very community project why was reaching out to. Many were women and each is a story of empowerment waiting to be told.

I will today tell you the story of two such women, though one of them was a baby when I first met her. I mean Rani and Kiran. Rani must have been about 15 or so way back in 2000 when we set foot on the street she lived in. A school drop out – not because of poor marks, Rani is Harvard Business School material – but because she was beaten for being late in paying her fees and her doting mother withdrew her from school. Rani had finished a nursing’s aide course and was waiting to get married as in her community girls are married at an early age. Though she lived in the shadow of a  very dominating mother who barely allowed her to speak, I could sense a feisty spirit that was raring to break free. Thankfully her mother liked me and accepted that Rani help me in my work and she thus ‘joined’ project why and was in charge of our nutrition programme where we distributed bananas and cookies to children. The way she set about her task from minute one showed that she was a born leader. That banana and cookie tray was her first step to empowerment. A decade later she was and still is heading a large part of project why. Along the way she finished school, got her Bachelor’s degree and I am told she will soon get her Masters. 

But that is not the real side of her journey to empowerment. The real side lies in her acquired ability and prowess to alter the destiny of her family and thus become a true agent of change. The young girl who once only wore the ungainly clothes her mother chose, has now convinced the same mother that wearing a pair of jeans or a skirt does not change who you are and that values do not depend on the way you dress. Rani’s deep beliefs are intact and she has shown that one can be ‘modern’ without giving up what is important. Rani has transformed the quality of life of her family and her aptitude in sifting out the good from the not good is remarkable. The child who once had to carry water from long distances and sleep on a mud floor, is now a savvy woman in charge of her destiny and the destiny of her family. A truly empowered woman who will walk the extra mile when needed and hold on to what she believes. 

The other ‘woman’ who got empowered along the way is Kiran. She was 1 day old when I first held her and is now a teenager. Thanks to the support of her aunt Rani who had understood that a good education was the real trampoline to a better life, she  was admitted in a good public school and is now in class VIII. She is a spirited teenager who knows her mind and has her head in the right place. Kiran is the little girl who spends her holidays teaching our challenged children,  some of whom she has known all her life. She had opinions and defends them when needed. 

These two young women are the proof that if given the right conditions and support, one can battle strangling patriarchy and unfair and unreasonable diktats. They are the kind of women who can turn India into the ‘superpower’ mentioned above. But there is caveat. These two young ladies could only begin their empowerment journey because they had moved from survival mode to risen from survival mode thanks to the hard work and determination of their mother and grandmother. They had the basic enabling environment that is the first stet to any empowerment: food, a roof on their heads, access to school, health and so on.

When politicians come up with highfalutin ideas about empowering women they forget that in India today millions of women are denied the very basic needs to survive. A mother who has to constantly worry about how to get one meal for her children even if that means ferreting for grains in a rat’s burrow, cannot begin to think of empowerment of any kind.Her life moves from one meal to another with an occasional thought about what story she would tell her child to lull him to sleep should she not be able to get anything to eat. This is a reality we cannot shy away from. I once again quote Ash in the Belly:  They scour the harvested fields of the landlords with brooms to garner the gleaning of the stray grains of wheat and paddy… they follow field rats to their burrows and are skilled in scrapping out the grains stolen and stored underground by the rodents…after each weekly market ends, they collect in their sari edges, grain  spilled inadvertently by traders or rotting waste vegetable… they even sift through cow dung for undigested grain. (Ash in the Belly page 6). Maybe the politicians who talk of women’s empowerment should read this book before they open their mouth.

The women of India are extraordinary beings who survive in circumstances beyond imagination. The first step to empowering them is to help them move out of the survival mode they are condemned to and give them the dignity they deserve. What will happen after will be nothing short of a miracle. Maybe that is what the 51% so fear!

1176 hours equals 49 days. 49 days is all it took for the new kid on the political block to be compelled to render its resignation. The jury of course is out. I watched with amusement how the satraps were quick to vituperate and denounce the move and try to muddy the waters. We all saw what happened in the Assembly as old foes got together to defeat a bill that was meant to reign in corruption. I am not going into the merits of the bill which I am sure is not perfect, but then do feel that the valour with which old adversaries stuck to each other speaks volumes. The way in which they pretended to be knights defending the Holy Grail of corruption was to say the least laughable. And their wanting us to believe that they were simply safeguarding modalities and procedures did not fool anyone. The bottom line was that none of the old political parties wanted a law that would target them. It was too uncomfortable to say the least. When the session ended they were quick to go on camera to show themselves in a good light.

With the resignation came the accusations. The incumbent government it was said had run away as it was unable to keep the promises it had made. This sounded preposterous. They had been in power for a mere 1000 hours as compared to the 66 years the people of this country had patiently and stoically given to the old and entrenched parties. 66 years in which no government had been able to give drinking water, 2 square meals and a roof to millions of people. And what about proper schools, health facilities, roads without potholes, electricity in other words all the things that are enshrined in the very Constitution every one was pretending to defend. I guess it is a case of selective choices. Where is the justice, equality, liberty and fraternity we the people gave to ourselves on the 26th November 1949. These words ring hollow when we see them in the reality that surrounds us. Liberty and equality is only for the chosen few. So to my mind it sounds ludicrous to expect anyone to deliver promises in a mere 1176 hours.

What endeared and still endears the likes of me to the new political party that briefly shone on the political firmament of our city is the fact that they sounded like a breath of fresh air and went against everything that we were forced to accept as the almost holy prerogative of those we had elected: from red beacon lights to unbearable arrogance with everything in between. The ‘mango’ party as it has contemptuously been called, was the exact opposite. True they were unable to ‘pass’ their pet bill and thus true to their words they resigned but not before exposing for those of us who are willing to see, the fact that sleeping with the enemy is totally acceptable when needed and that finally all political parties have similar agendas.

This post is neither an apologia nor an elegy. It is simply a statement of facts that one needs to remember. The din and noise that is being made to try and drown the little positives that have happened in the past 1176 hours should not blind us to what we have witnessed. For the first time we saw some kind of shelters put up for the homeless and even if they were just tents at least it was something. An audit was made of the existing schools’ resources something that activists had been clamouring for, hospitals were also inspected and remedial measures taken where possible. An anti corruption cell was set up and if nothing else, for the last 1176 hours the police harassed fewer people as was confirmed by the three wheeler drivers we employ.

An attempt to listen to the people was also made. True the weekly contact programme had to be abandoned for practical purposed but I am sure some other system would have been found. The idea of local committees to suggest how the money given to local leaders should be spent was a good one as we are all silent and mute spectators to the innumerable times perfectly good footpaths are destroyed and rebuilt for no reason at all if not the garnering of deep pockets. With time I am sure a via media would have been found and the money used in a sensible way that would benefit people. But therein lay the problem: all these changes were touching issues that would have hurt those used to make money. It was bad enough to have one’s red beacon lights taken away but basta! Let us not forget how quickly – in a matter of minutes – the Parliament passes a bill to increase their salaries and how bills that would better the lives of the disabled or women linger in Parliament for years at an end. Get the picture?

No one wants their comfortable boats to be rocked. There is a line that cannot be crossed. And the AAP was guilty of crossing the line.

It was refreshing to see a party that believed in transparency. It is time political parties were upfront with the source of their financing. The uber expensive PR campaigns we are witnessing – be it the lengthy TV and print advertisement or the state of the art tea parties – makes us wonder where the funds are coming from. And come to think of it the sight of a CM sleeping on the pavement touched many more people – I am referring to simple people – then the glitzy advertisements that punctuate any TV programme we see.

The Cassandras will come up with all sort of criticisms as days go by. The Pollyannas will hold on to the dream that they believe in. Somewhere in between the likes of us must decide whether we want change and if we do, whether we are willing to forgive mistakes and above all give time to anyone who is willing to walk an honest talk. If we are not, then we are doomed to the old ways for a long time to come.