by Anuradha Bakshi | Jun 4, 2009 | Uncategorized
Got a mail from my dear friend Xiong. He was a volunteer with us two years back but then, slowly, became a dear friend, someone whose advise and ideas I respect and try to follow: a sounding board for a lot of what we do and often I find myself listening to him and implementing his suggestions. In his latest mail Xiong informed me that he was joining our sponsorship programme. I guess that he more than anyone else read in between the lines all that was left unsaid.
Now the sponsorship programme allows you to select a class and Xiong in his inimitable gentle style simply wrote: If I had to choose a class I would like to be updated on news about the secondary section because I seldom read about them much on your blog, and also because I’m somehow more emotionally attuned to teenagers.
Touche! He was right. I seldom write about the secondary kids, at most when they bring back laurels that add to our already heavy wreath. Are they not the ones who have year after a year for almost a decade passed every single examinations they sat for. It was time to make amends and also to do some soul searching. Why were they the ones one rarely wrote about?
The answer was simple. They were the good child in the project why family. The one you take for granted, the one who never steps out of line and always does what you expect it to. And hence the one you overlook as you wit in front of your screen to share your trials and tribulations. But today I will write about them as I should have long ago.
Our senior secondary section is a bunch of about 100 teenagers from class IX to XII. They are under the care of their Naresh Sir, the very young man who took on the challenge nine years ago of ensuring that those everyone called gutter snipe, would shine and excel. And for the last almost a decade he has been doing just that. The secondary section is located in an airy room on top of our computer class. Every time we go and visit the class, we find them sitting with their heads buried in their note books. They barely look up,as they wish you the time of the day and you just tiptoe away from fear of disturbing them.
Unlike other classes they have few demands: a book now and again, money to make photocopies and once a year just before the final examinations, a plea for an outing to the movies. Then when the results are out they drop by to thank you with the customary box of sweets and a proud smile on their happy faces!
Then they are ready to take on the big world with confidence and poise, and we watch them leave the nest with pride and clouded eyes.
by Anuradha Bakshi | Jun 3, 2009 | Uncategorized
The results of class XII and X are out. All the 36 project why children have passed with flying colours. Amit topped his school with 815 and Vivek got a whopping 97% in his class X. I am elated and terribly proud. Anyone would be I guess, but allow me to share where we come from.
In the winter of 2001, we only ran a few spoken English classes . One day, two class X boys came with welt on their arms. They had been severely beaten for no apparent reason. The hurt and humiliation they felt was unbearable and we decided to go and talk to the principal of their school. We had by that time got ourselves a copy of a High Court order that made corporal punishment prohibited by law.
We marched into the school and asked to see the Principal. We were met by a teacher who looked forbidding and who strutted about a stick in hand. We were taken to a huge room that looked straight out of a Dickens novel. Behind a large desk sat a small man. We were asked to take a seat. The man kept leering us in stony silence. I cleared my throat and began my diatribe. The man was thoroughly uninterested in what I was saying. After a while he called for the boys in question. They entered the room, almost cringing and stood in a corner their heads bowed. The man who was actually the principal of the school looked at them with utmost contempt and said to us: Are these the boys you are talking about. They are guttersnipe. They will never succeed in anything. Mark my words they will fail their exam. The boys looked totally devastated; their body language said it all.
We were speechless. This was not at all going like we wanted it to. On the spur of the moment I looked at the boys with a beaming smile and said: Ok boys, do we take a challenge and prove your principal wrong. I know you will pass your examination. The immediate change in the body language of the boys was mind blowing and heart warming. They nodded their heads and smiled. The principal was taken aback but said nothing. Emboldened I added: we will all pass this examination Sir!
That is how our secondary programme began, on a roadside, in the early hours of winter mornings. But we did win our challenge and all our boys passed their class X. Today most of them are gainfully employed and doing well. And since that day each and every year our students have cleared their Board examinations without fail!
When I see Vivek or Amit’s marks my heart swells with joy. I am again taken back to a day many years ago when I marched into another school to ask why were the students only taught part of the curriculum, I was simply told that as they needed 40% to pass, there was no need to teach them the entire curriculum! Thank heaven things have changed since, but when I see my kids pass their exams each year I remember our beginnings and feel we have really come a long way. At times like these I do give myself a pat in the back !
by Anuradha Bakshi | Jun 2, 2009 | Uncategorized
On the way to the doctor’s Utpal and Meher came visiting. They are both extraordinary kids with incredible spirits. Meher is undergoing plastic surgery and looks like an adorable ET and Utpal is as always a true hero.
Looking at them my mind went back to the day Utpal had first landed in my life. He was a bonny almost one year old that his mom use to bathe in the open in front of the door of my old office at exactly the time I use to walk in. I had taken to pat his wet head and ask the same question every morning: when are you sending him to our creche? I never knew then that his journey to our creche located just a door away would have to go through a baptism by fire. And yet had not that happened Utpal may just have been a rowdy little boy in a government school who perhaps came to a pwhy centre in the mornings. But that was not to be. A terrible accident ensured his life would change forever and Popples as I call him is today in class II in a nice boarding school.
Little Meher has her tryst with fire in a remote Bihar village almost three years ago. She was badly maimed and would have carried on like that were it not for a on the spot decision of her father to join his brother in Delhi. The brother’s rented hovel happened to be nest to our women centre and it was there that I met her one fine morning. The rest his history. She touched many lives and they decided to sponsor her reconstructive surgery. Today she looks like an ET because of the expanders in her scalp which will ensure that most of her scars disappear and her hand has already been repaired. She too will one day join Utpal in boarding school.Today they are both living at the women centre and though they sometimes fight, they are true soul mates.
I wonder what would have happened to both these children had they not sustained third degree burns. Strange are His ways, but then can we complain?
by Anuradha Bakshi | May 29, 2009 | Uncategorized
Little Radha is quietly completing her work. Looking at her you would think that all is well in her little world, or at least as well as can be. Yet Radha spent the night on the footpath. The reason: her little home was raised to the ground by the local authorities. The reason again: it was an illegal construction though her family had to pay 400 rs a month and more. And yet it was the only shelter her family had. It was the only protection from the sun or the rains that they had and the place where Radha can keep her brittle bones safe
True that by any standards the so called house was not fit for any consumption but in a city that has forsaken its poor it was the home the little family had carefully crafted. Radha and her family are one of the millions of voiceless, faceless families that come to the big city looking for a better life. The tragic loss of the father made this little family even more vulnerable. The family had spent the last two nights on the footpath. The mother spends the days desperately looking for a room to rent within her tiny budget.
I am not one to defend illegal structures. But I would like someone to help me understand how legality or the lack of it is defined. Most of the so called illegal dwellings of Delhi have postal addresses and their inmates have voter identity cards and ration cards. The most blatant example is that of the Lohars or iron smith gypsies that have been living on the pavement for three generations now! Their homes are destroyed time and again but then rebuild the next day after paying the right bribe. Over the years illegal structures have acquired a covert legality. Then one fine day, because of some upcoming fancy sports extravaganza or some court judgement that took forever to be pronounced the structures become illegal notwithstanding civic documents or empty promises. It is time to raise them all and the authorities do that with impunity.
Not far from where we are there were some more structures raised to the ground. Two of them were small food carts. I guess this was done in accordance to a supreme court order banning food vendors. This is the beginning of the end of a lifeline, one that will spell disaster in a city that is already witnessing a rising crime graph.
by Anuradha Bakshi | May 25, 2009 | Uncategorized
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it wrote the Sufi poet Rumi. These words were sent to me in answer of the sponsorship appeal I recently put out on the world wide web!
I sat a long time wondering what the hidden message could be as normally one would have expected people to convey their support and in due course become sponsors. And then slowly it dawned on me. What my friend meant was basically not to give up but to try and find all the obstructions I had within myself that were stopping me from doing what I needed to.
No economic crisis or loss of funders should ever be allowed to come in the way of the future of my 800 kids. I just had find all the obstacles and remove them. What I had in custody was the smiles, hope and morrows of almost a thousand voiceless kids. I did not have the right or luxury to give up. And if I looked hard what I sought was not impossible: a hundred sponsors who would hold my hand and help me achieve what I had set out to do!
by Anuradha Bakshi | May 25, 2009 | Uncategorized
As I sat this morning wondering what today’s post would be in the light of what one is going through, my mind wandered back to an old post I knew I had written some years back when I was desperately trying to pitch and defend my erstwhile and forgotten one-rupee-a-day programme. Today I find myself coming full circle as I try to make a case for our new sponsorship programme. I fished it out of the wood work! It was simply entitled:
One rupee a day and planet India revisited
one-rupee-a-day was an intuitive thought that had come to my mind way back in 1998 when project why was a tiny embryo… it seemed to be such a perfect solution.. was not India rich in mumbers.. and a rupee was something easily spared..
like all intuitive thoughts it got pushed back in the face of raised eyebrows, puzzled looks and amused smiles.. copious advise about the ways of goodBiz was proffered: donations, funding organisations, fund raising extravaganza, charity sales and much else.. and the greenhorn that iI was had no option than to take the well trodden path.. somewhat ill at ease I must admit.. to my mind this did not gel with what I had stood for and certainly not with India..
the one-rupee-day kept coming back with obsessive regularity… but I paid all the dues to the goodBiz world, and did the rounds of all that was suggested, and to be honest many options worked and pushed project why into a comfort zone bringing success, kudos, praise and even recognition..
but the goodBiz had its own hidden rules, one of them being its fleeting nature.. come on ms.B no one does this forever, you must change with times and adapt to the flavour of the day.. now that was not acceptable.. education is life long and not transitory and one does not leave people midway, one empowers them to carry on… and the solutions offered did not work..
reality hit us as we were pushed out of our comfort zone, more than once and each time the one rupee leit motiv sprung back to life. It seemed to have all the answers to problems. If education was perennial then the funding option we sought had to be one that any Indian could participate in and any Indian could steer..
So if we stand by what we set out to do: establish a model that can reach every child and be steered by its own, then all resources have to come from within. Five years of goodBizMessing had finally taught us that we needed to go all out and make the one-rupee-option a success, beating all odds..
But nothing would have prepared us for what was to ensue: a new discovery of India which no one could have imagined.
We launched a multi-pronged appeal to a wide audience: netizens, people from all walks of life through brochures, personal meetings, telephone calls.. and with the replies and reactions a new map of India came alive.
Indians living away from their mother land, be it students or professionals, reacted with overwhelming spontaneity and unadulterated love for their motherland. Individual responses and collective efforts saw the light and bore fruit at breathtaking speed.. needless to say most of them had never seen project why… There was profuse support from unknwon people across India, more so from the southern and western states… the community and weaker sections of society did come forward with suggestions and contributions..
We started feeling elated… come on India numbered one billion hearts, now finding 4000 should be easy..
But it was not so as we were to realise once again.. the cynics appeared with their unbelievable tales.. India’s capital once again took the lead of this tragic Act of the play.. what amazed us the most was the fact that people who had seen project why did not find it in them to write a cheque for 360 rs.. let alone get us contributions from friends.. everything possible was said to deter us, the trophy going to an upmarket restaurant owner who felt that adding one rupee to a bill may lead him to a litigation ten years hence..
Does one give up… the answer is No.. the cynicism is so deep that it has to be set right… if the goodBiz is in such a mess then why should a child in need of help pay the price… it is for us to reinvent ourselves and wipe out misconceptions..
As I look at this new map of India, where the common denominator is its heart and ability to feel compassion for the other, I see boundaries extending way beyond its geographical entity… and if the little hearts are few within its own land then somewhere someone has gone wrong..
The one-rupee-a-day has to work… to set matters right and the last shred of doubt I had was wiped away this morning as I flipped through a magazine which had an article on the children dying of malnutrition in Maharashtra with a photograph of a baby whose ribs you could count but whose eyes still help hope..
No you do not give up on planet India..
Yes we have come full circle today as we seek 100 sponsors from the world over.
