by Anuradha Bakshi | Aug 26, 2008 | Uncategorized
It is fifteen years since the golden summer of 1991 when we lost our innocence wrote Gurcharan Das in a recent article. He was of course referring to our new affair with the the free economy and our expansion as a growing economy. I am no economist and do not understand market forces and the likes of it. I simply see what is around me and draw comparisons with was was an what is.
Last week we celebrated or let us say commemorated 61 years of Independence. All leading magazines had special issues and one must admit no one had anything glorious to share. Even Vinod Mehta who always proffers some light relief on his last page candidly states: I’m looking to offer you some humour. Alas, there’s none to offer. A quick read of the Independence day issue of this or any other magazine does not make happy reading. A leit motiv seems to appear almost with obsessive regularity is the fact that our brave walk on the free economy path has further alienated the poor of the rich. The rich have their schools, their hospitals, their habitat, their markets, their just about everything whereas the infrastructure of the poor is growing from bad to worse.
One of the articles that caught my attention was the one on gated Communities aptly titled Free from India.
The proliferation of gated communities is undoubtedly a world wide phenomena and its Indian avatar larger than life. An article in the New York Times reflects the sad reality of gated communities in our capital region. If one India lives a life of luxury inside the walls, the other survives at its very gates. The raison d’etre of these communities is best defined by a resident himself who states: Everyone understands that there are things outside that you don’t want to expose your children to. The idea is to have the area sealed and sanitised. The apartment costs are huge, but it’s worth it to protect yourself from the violence and crime outside… When I leave these gates I am bang slap in modern India. I can’t say that I don’t like India; it’s my country. But if I can avoid exposing myself to it, why not?‘
The above statement is to say the least perplexing and saddening. Are we simply giving up on India? is creating comfortable and yet visible cocoons the real way out. Did we really lose our innocence when we decided to walk the free trade path and open India’s doors? I cannot say. But if an Indian says that he or she does not want to expose his or her child to things outside, outside being the real India then something is terribly wrong. As citizens of India are we not responsible for that very outside.
by Anuradha Bakshi | Aug 26, 2008 | Uncategorized
It was exactly one year ago almost to the day that a mail dropped into my inbox. My name is Willy and I am very interested in becoming involved in Project Why. I run a small NGO in America called the Omprakash Foundation. Those words were the beginning of a beautiful journey of mutual discovery, a journey were the key words were love, compassion, respect and trust.
Yesterday another mail dropped in my inbox. It simply said: check out”featured partner” on the omprakash homepage.…. A click on the page and there we were: Project Why as this Season’s featured partner with a special page on us that described our activities and our needs in beautiful and simple words. It was indeed some journey from email to webpage!
Over the past almost ten years I have come across wonderful people who have reached out to help us and each one of them have made pwhy possible. When Willy and his friends landed in Delhi a few months back it was truly a special moment as such kids are one of a kind. They brought with them all that makes today’s world still bearable.
But let us go back a little. Before we met Willy and I use to exchange long emails and I found myself sharing my deepest thoughts with him quite unabashedly. It never came to my mind that more than 4 decades of life on this planet separated on us. He simply became the friend I needed in moments of doubts, pain and joy. He always had the right words and often gave my sagging moral the fillip it needed. Somewhere along the way he shared his dream of bringing books to the lives of children all over India and though it was in no way up our sleeve, there was not an iota in doubt in my mind when I decided to jump on the wagon and make it a success. Today over 200 000 books have found their way into the remotest part of our land and are brightening up the lives of many children. Project Why children too are busy discovering the magic of the written word. And what better proof of success of this venture than the fact that some books did surreptitiously find their way into children’s homes!
As the omprakash story enfolded it was as if a remote dream of mine was coming to life albeit in a land thousands of miles from mine. I have always prayed to see the day when young Indians would be touched by compassion and would reach out to less fortunate people and share some of what they have:time, resources, love… as this is what omprakash is all about. A bunch of kids backpack through India and other lands. On the way they stop by to volunteer in a few organisations and somewhere along the way they decided to do something. And the something is for all to see!
What makes Willy, Gordon, Ashely, Lilly, Steve, Nick, Elliot tick? I do not know. Or to use a Hindi expressions: of what mater are they made. I guess the very same one we are made of. But the difference lies in their ability to see with their heart. And what does it take to make young successful people see with their heart is for me a zillion dollar question? I must confess that when I started project why one of the head fake or indirect learning (to use Randy Pausch’s expression) objective was to try and sensitize young Indians and show them how to see with their hearts. Sadly it was not to be.
The journey from email to webpage has been a exhilarating and rewarding one. To the uninitiated it can be quantified by the generous resources we have received and that we are truly grateful for. But for this old lady it has been much more: a renewal of faith and trust, a validation of ideals that many found preposterous and absurd, a ray of sunshine in a sometimes grey world and much more that remains tacit.
I truly hope and pray that all the omprakash foundation reaches unknown heights and realises all the hopes and aspirations of the wonderful hearts that steer it. And I know that this will happen as more than anyone else a wonderful old man, who touched the lives of these kids many summers ago and whose name is the one they chose for their organisation, blesses them as he simply litstens to his radio in a remore part of India’s capital city.
by Anuradha Bakshi | Aug 23, 2008 | Uncategorized
As I was leaving the women centre yesterday I was as usual greeted by loud good morning maam’s (notwithstanding the time of day) from the gang of kids that live in thee vicinity and often play in front of the centre. I stopped as I normally do. Amongst them was a new face. Huge melting eyes in the middle of a tiny badly scalded face. A closer look reveals burn scars on the body, arms and a badly maimed hand. I stop in my tracks, my heart pounding and am suddenly taken back to the fateful day in March 2003 when I first laid eyes on the little scalded Utpal.
The little girl standing in front of me is about 2. Her scars look almost as old. I look around for answers to my silent questions. After a few long seconds an older girl offers some insight: the little girl was burnt when she was just a baby. She was sleeping in a mosquito net, the kind you find in all markets and that look like a huge bell. There was an oil lamp burning in the vicinity and the net made of cheap nylon caught fire. The baby too!
She survived. But unlike Utpal whose face had got spared, hers got badly scalded. Two huge almost identical scars mar her little cheeks. But somehow her impish smile and lovely eyes are endearing and make you forget the ugliness of her scars. To me she was just a child, with the same dreams, aspirations and hopes in spite of her scars and maimed hand. My mind is choking with questions and emotions. What will the future hold for her? What can we do? How can we ease her morrows? How do her peers treat her? Why is God sometimes so unkind?
Just like Utpal’s, her family too shifted only recently to a house almost adjacent to our women centre. Is there some hidden Jungian synchronicity? Some hidden message? Is it once again the God of Lesser Beings at his best?
I do not what the future holds. As I write these words I dot even know her name let alone anything about her. All I know is that I cannot and will not be a silent spectator. A maimed girl has no morrow in a land like ours where the future of any girl child lies in her ability to find a good match. Her family is poor and will not be able to make up for the scars and the maimed hand by providing her a handsome dowry. I do not know whether medical wizardry can be of help and even it it is at what cost it will come. I know that a good education and sound income generating skills are the only hope she has.
I will go back to the centre today and set the ball rolling by seeing that she is enrolled in our creche. I will call up all the men in white I know, browse the net and connect with anyone one i think can be of help. I will do everything I can to ensure that the huge eyes in the scarred face remain filled with trust and hope and never have to suffer the indignity and stigma that is often the fate of those like her.
by Anuradha Bakshi | Aug 21, 2008 | Uncategorized
I was invited by a dear friend to write the 1000th post of his blog. It was an honour and it took me a long time to decide what to write. You can read the post entitled childhood dreams here.
by Anuradha Bakshi | Aug 15, 2008 | Uncategorized
After a long time I decided to check the site traffic on both the website and the blog. To say that I was in for a surprise would be the understatement of the year! I would have liked to believe that something was wrong, that the code was not correct, that the programme was not running properly. But that was not the case. All seemed in order except the flat line that greeted me instead of the pikes and curves. No one had dropped by in a long long time. I was staggered. I had been posting regular entries and nothing seemed to have changed.
Many questions crowded my mind: what had happened? what was I doing differently? what needed to be done? was there a hidden message? and each begged for an answer. True there was a time when over and above posting on the blog, one wrote mails to all friends and supporters with regularity, sharing news or begging for help. The last such onslaught had been at the beginning of the year when we were looking for help to buy our land. The land was bought and somehow unknowingly we had entered a new phase of our existence. Gone were the days when we simply needed enough support to survive month after month. We were now in another league. And perhaps this unconscious shift changed things surreptitiously.
The flat line that greeted me this morning was a harsh reality check. Something was wrong. Was it a case of out of sight, out of mind. A simple lack of visibility. I cannot tell. True we have not been in the media for long and true that direct communication has been far and few but things on the ground have not changed. We are very much alive and need all the help we can muster. We are still dependent on individual help and conscious of the fact that till date most of it has come via the net and blogging. So a flat line is akin to a death knell.
Had I sunk into a strange comfort zone where I thought that simply posting blogs would be enough to garner support. I must confess that there was a time when I did network much more actively. Was I content with the occasional comment posted on some bogs and felt secure? Maybe. But the flat line was a rude wake up call and I guess a much needed one.
We are alive and much of what we were earlier. We still reached out of over 600 kids and reach out to anyone in need of help. Our kids still bring us a 100% result and we had some excellent results in the Boards. Our women’s programme has grown remarkably and our new residential inclusive outreach is doing exceptionally well and is a great learning experience and a sound testing ground for planet why. We still need all the help we can get and have in no way grown a big head!
I confess to have been a little slack in my ways and promise to make huge amends as the life hopes and aspirations of many depend on it.
by Anuradha Bakshi | Aug 14, 2008 | Uncategorized
The UNICEF report of the state of Asia Pacific’s children 2008 was published just a few days ago. According to this report 20% children under five who die every year are from India. The figures is staggering: 2 million. the report goes on to state: Unless India achieves major improvements in health, nutrition, water and sanitation, education, gender equality and child protection, global efforts to reach the MDGs will fail…as more services within countries are privatized and the government share of health budgets diminishes, public facilities become more run down and health workers leave for better paid jobs in the private sector or outside the country. The divide between rich and poor is rising at a troubling rate within sub regions of Asia-Pacific, leaving vast numbers of mothers and children at risk of increasing relative poverty and continued exclusion from quality primary health-care services.
It is a sad reflection of a country that celebrates three generations of freedom.
Our real achievement seems to have been a staggering increase of the gap between the rich and the poor. India is far from shining. The children of India are still waiting for an elusive Bill that will give them their constitutional right to Education. And while a city is gearing up to meet world standards to host an international sporting event, children are withering away in dark holes in a city that has forsaken its poor.
Can any society worthy of its name claim to be shining if its most vulnerable group remains neglected? I wonder. Children have no voice, and are not vote banks. Yet they need the maximum care and protection. It is not so in India today. Child labour is rampant, child abuse of all shade and hue unbridled and though politically correct statements are made by one and all, they are rarely translated into action.
Two million children below the age of 5 die quietly every year in India. Is anyone hearing.
