by anouradha bakshi | Jun 21, 2017 | Stories
At the time of this photo, in January 2009, Meher was three years old and lived in Khader, near the outskirts of New Delhi. Her father was a migrant worker who came to New Delhi to work part of the year, and her family spent the rest of the year in their village in Nepal.
When Meher was eight or nine months old, a mosquito net over her bed caught on fire. Miraculously, she survived the terrible burns, but the experience left her face and scalp badly scarred and her left hand permanently closed and deformed. Meher’s father is a daily wage labourer. Her family could not afford to seek additional treatment for her, although they were concerned about her future prospects in Indian society.
Meher had been enrolled in Project WHY from a young age. She is extremely bright, verbal, and social and had picked up a little English from her time at Khader. She interacts confidently with visitors from all over the world. When an American elementary school teacher, Nina Sethi, came to give our staff some training, she took an immediate liking to Meher. We explained to her the social issues that plague a girl with such burns in Indian society and Nina was keen to help. Whenever Nina would arrive to work with the teachers, Meher would greet her and help to oversee her English class. Nina describes an “immediate connection and a special bond,” and notes that she “recognised something in Meher: a great capacity for leadership and an amazing spirit.”
In January of 2009, Nina asked her friends and family and a non-profit organisation in the United States, Chess Without Borders, to help her raise enough money to cover the cost of reconstructive plastic surgery on Meher’s hand and face. This would have to include staying in the hospital, multiple operations, medicine, physical therapy, and much more. She was also keen to extend the fund to raise money for Meher’s education, as she is very intelligent and had had limited opportunities in her past.
The response that Nina received was overwhelming. Through her dedication and commitment, she was able to raise over $45,000 (USD), which was more than enough money for Meher’s surgeries and education, and is likely to last her until her higher education. Thankfully, her surgeries were completed successfully at a private hospital near her home.
Meher now attends Shanti Gyam International School in New Delhi with some other children she knows from Project WHY. She is flourishing and is consistently the top student in her class. Nina often visits her in New Delhi and enjoys speaking to Meher in English. Meher is now outgoing, confident and intelligent and loves Nina like family!
by anouradha bakshi | Jun 21, 2017 | Uncategorized
Project WHY opened its first spoken English class for secondary students in 2001 in Giri Nagar. It was the same time that Naresh had just completed his Bachelor’s degree in Arts and was looking for a job. He was a whizz mathematician and loved to teach, and to fulfill this passion he was giving tuitions to the neighborhood children, often for free. But in a poor home, one cannot afford to dream, for dreams do not put food on the table. Naresh tried his hand at various jobs, even as a vendor in a shoe shop, which just lasted two-days. His heart was not in it.
One day, in November 2001, a Class 10 student, Aadarsh, came to class with large welts on his arms. He had been brutally beaten in the government school he attended. Corporal punishment still prevails in many Indian schools despite a law against it. Project WHY resource persons visited the government school. The experience was Dickensian. The headmaster kept whirling the stick in his hand to make his point. The boy and other Project WHY students were humiliated. The boys were called guttersnipes and the Principal contemptuously informed us that these boys would never pass their Class 10 Board Examinations (a state level examination).
Project WHY took up the challenge of providing these boys with support to clear their Class 10 examination. With no funds, no space and no teacher to take this forward, Project WHY was in need of a miracle to get the bunch of lads ready for an exam in two short months.
A miracle came in the form of Naresh, who happened to be the elder brother of a teacher, Rani. He had just finished his degree and was looking for a job in the Giri Nagar area, where Project WHY had started. The only space available was the dusty pavement in front of our center and the only time available to tutor the students was between 7.30am to 9.30 am in the morning before they went to school. Every morning ten students assembled in front of the center, some mats were laid out and Naresh and his boys sat in a circle to study. The cold was kept at bay by cups of tea graciously offered by Naresh’s family.
That year, the challenge was won. The boys cleared their Class 10 examinations and this marked the beginning of Project WHY’s secondary outreach programme. Since then, Naresh has single-handedly ensured the success of hundreds of boys and girls who have successfully cleared their Board exams. The boy with the welts is now father of a little boy and all set to immigrate to Australia after having completed his higher education.
To Naresh, teaching a student is a mission he cannot fail. When exams approach, he schedules extra classes and teaches at the crack of dawn or late into the night. This is quite a feat for someone who likes a morning lie-in and a late session with his pals! On exam days, he is as nervous as his students, if not more, and waits for their return so he can find out how it all went. Come results day, his nails are bitten to the base as he scours the Internet, his students in tow.
Recently, when he went visited the Project Why Okhla Center and found out that the senior secondary students were in need of some extra tutoring, he rescheduled his timetable and took them under his wings. He never seeks extra compensation. Naresh often tells his students that he wishes there had been a Project WHY when he was growing up.
by anouradha bakshi | May 23, 2017 | Anou's Blog, Uncategorized
Live so that when your child thinks of fairness, caring, integrity she thinks of you. These words sum Ram and Kamala’s life. Today a more than a quater of a century after I lost them, and in the seventh decade of my life, I know I could not have been who I am if not for them.
They would have celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary today. I know they are popping the champagne bottle in heaven and I raise my glass to their happiness.
You may wonder why a blog about anniversaries and personal memories on what should be a post on Project Why. The answer is simple. Project Why is the logical outcome of an only child eagerly following her parents’ example day after day and not their advice. Advice is tinted by social mores, and politically correct guidance, example is from the heart. Advise would have been a lucrative career, a heavy bank balance, luxury holidays and three starred dinners. They gave me all that while I was still a child. I had my fill and sought more, but did not know what ‘more’ was as that never came as ‘advise”!
That came after they left and I sat looking desperately for the legacy they had left behind. It was not in the boxes and trunks and memorabilia that was strewn around me. I was terribly lost. All I had to hold on to were my father’s last words: don’t lose faith in India! It was November 1992.
It would take six long years of loneliness and pain to finally discover what the legacy was. Six long years of remembering their lives, the bittersweet memories, the stories often unfinished and bereft of any moral precept. And slowly it all came to me, in no order at all but somehow fitting the puzzle that would become Project Why. From Kamala’s side it was education, women’s right, patriotism, gender equality, standing for what is right, self-respect, courage and unconditional love. From Ram’s it was humanity, compassion, tolerance, social equality, generosity, giving unabashedly, giving when you did not have and of course culture, savoir-faire, integrity, probity and simple living.
It was left to me to honour this legacy.
And to honour them I set up Project Why with the hope that all the lessons learnt at their knee would be reflected in what I have been striving to do for the past 18 years!
by anouradha bakshi | May 16, 2017 | Anou's Blog, Uncategorized
Every organisation has beginning. Project Why did not begin with a funding proposal ora a strategic plan – it began with the values passed down by my parents especially my mother Kamala Goburdhun. Her determination to pursue education against all odds and her quiet compassion shaped not only my life but also the work of Project Why. This is the story of the woman who guides everything we do
The Trust does not bear her name. Once again it was the flamboyant husband who won the match! But the real inspiration and the quiet and gentle motivating force as always in my life was Kamala Goburdhun née Sinha. Her lessons were not exuberant like those of her better half. They were subdued and tender, cameos of her life she shared with her only child. In the week mother’s are celebrated the world over, I would like to share some of these stories as each is echoed in Project Why.
Kamala the child was determined to go to school and her doting father did not stop her from getting enrolled in the first school for girls that opened its doors in the sleepy town of Meerut where the family lived. The school was established in 1929. She was already 12 years old but that did not detract her. There was no looking back. For education she would break all the rules. And she had two formidable women in her corner: her paternal grandmother and her mother! The three would devise ways to win over the Gandhian father. Kamala went on several hunger strikes to be able to continue her studies beyond class VI, go to Banaras Hindu University for her BA, do her MA and LLB. Her final degree would be a PHD at Charles University Prague, after the loss of her first born. Kamala was your never give up woman.
But there is more in the life of this small town freedom fighter’s daughter who went on to become an Ambassador’s wife. When she reached the age when girls would be married, she made a pact with her father, a pact both would honour. She was adamant about not having a child in a land that was not free and hence would not marry before India’s becoming independent, and should she still be of age, would marry whoever her father chose.
But that was not all. Her concern for fellow women was so deep, that she agreed to work for the British in order to reach out to war windows in the villages of Western UP to ensure that that their pension was not usurped by some male member of the family. She drove a truck to reach the far fledged villages. She lived alone in Mandi House Delhi and commuted every week to her home in Meerut in her little Baby Austin. In the villages she reached out to women in more ways than one. A real trouper!
India became Independent. Her father found a man, a man that would take her away on a real magical mystery tour. But the transition from freedom fighter’s daughter to diplomat’s wife was not easy. The first challenge came soon after marriage. A dinner at home where one of the invitees was the British Ambassador. Kamala was appalled at the thought of having to receive him in her home. How could she get past the memories of a little child applying balm to the lacerated backs of her father and his companions when they came back from yet another non-violent protest. This was her task as in those days there was purdah, and women did not mingle with men.
It took her husband oodles of patience and love to explain to her that India was free, and it was the Indian flag that flew on the house she lived in. She was to the manor born and understood what was expected of her. Again she never looked back and was the perfect diplomat’s wife.
So when I look at Project Why, at the years gone by, at the work we have achieved, I realise that though the Trust bears my father’s name, it is her lessons that are imbued in every breath I take, in every step I walk. My unequivocal and obsessive love for India and my pain at seeing how things are going, my determination to educate as many as I can, my desire to make women stand on their own feet. Everything is what she taught me.
So today I understand that if not for you, Kamala, there would be no Project Why!
