by Anuradha Bakshi | Jun 7, 2006 | Uncategorized
This morning I began the mail I sent to many friends and supporters with the words: here I am, begging bowl in hand.. and many answered with the words: please do not use phrases like begging bowl..
Most of the mails I write when I seek help are instinctive.. true that I have never used the word begging earlier … it was time for a bit of soul searching..
To beg means to ask for something earnestly and humbly says the dictionary.. quite true as gone are the days of anger and resentment when no help came.. now there is only gratitude for even the tiniest coin that drops by, as with it comes the love and care of a human heart, the precious moment spared to write a cheque or fill an on line form..
As I searched some more I remembered the Zen monk’s begging bowl: each day the monk would go out into the world with his empty bowl, and whatever was placed in his bowl by kind strangers would be his nourishment for the day. Nourishment can take more than one meaning and I realised that maybe I was like the Zen monk and my bowl got me so much: a heart fixed, a tear wiped, a child’s smile, a mother’s prayer answered, children remaining in school, a roof on someone’s head…
As I look with moist eyes at the picture above and see Manu in a classroom, intent in learning the new excercise and little Sapna looking up at him, my mind goes back to the Manu begging on the street and being fed like an animal and Sapna not able to hold her head, let alone stand on her own… and lok at them today… and all this has been made possible because so many of you dropped a bit of your heart in my begging bowl..
As long as I asked for a contribution in impersonal ways and resented the fact that it was not forthcoming nothing changed.. it is only when I was able to shed my misplaced arrogance and pride and humbly beg with my heart that my bowl filled slowly and miracles happened around me..
It is a very precious bowl I hold out as hidden in its depth is the key to a new heart, a new life, and many tomorrows filled with joy..
by Anuradha Bakshi | Jun 3, 2006 | Uncategorized
Just when you sit back and think that you have done your bit, and maybe can take a break , someone decides otherwise and a tiny broken heart lands softly on your planet. One look at the trusting eyes and innocent face and your mind is already racing.
Deepak is 7 months old and requires open heart surgery. Though his face is plump his tiny body is proof of how difficult the simple task of breathing is for this child. The scribbled now familiar green card of the All India Institute lies in front of you..
70 000 rs with the added 4000 for the angiograpy.. how can little deepak’s daily wage labourer father ever put that money together.. and you ask yourself which one of the thousands of prayers his mom must have whispered, did he hear!
One has to stop and I think at the reality we often do not see. One the one hand India is shining and more and more of our countryPals are making it on the world’s richest men list.. Five start medical facilities now attract a new form of tourism. But no effort is being made towards medical care for the poor.
A TV network recently showed an old educated couple begging in the streets of Mumbay. The dignified old lady wore a placard around her neck saying she had lost her eyesight, breast and home to cancer and needs help.
Looking at those pictures I felt so small and inadequate and wondered where had we gone wrong in building our nation.. True that after the programme, help poured in and the couple is now comfortable. But many questions remained unanswered.. is it only after a story of human tragedy is aired on TV that people open their hearts and feel a sense of responsibility..? does our charitable side needs external prompts to awaken..?
In our 7 years of up market begging one has had to accept the sad reality that individual heart wrenching cases do get heeded, whereas long term and preventive projects are difficult to sell.. the person willing to come forward in individual cases, tiptoes away when asked for help in our every day work..
A flash of intuition or some hidden instinct pushed me to set up a community driven grass root project, and in our 7th year running and in spite of the innumerable setbacks and looming temptations, the tug is still very much there. No magical wand is going to create a perfect social system no matter how committed an administration we have. The magical wand lies in our ability to awaken the charitable side that lies dormant in each one of us, so that a network of support is created at the micro level and takes care of its own – the poor, the handicapped, the old, the sick – and ultimately this is the network that will create the bridge between national programmes and the end user.
How, is the question, and my answer remains the same: the one rupee a day model, where the one rupee could be translated as free space, time, skills and resources.. If each of our outreach programmes could be handled by the local community, we would see a quantum leap in the number of children helped..
I have always held that India’s solutions lie in addressing simultaneously the macro and the micro level till the day the meet and synergise.
Will that day dawn in our life span, I do not know, but in the spirit of what has been said, one has to continue with conviction in what one feels is right.
Deepak needs a new heart that is today’s challenge, tomorrow’s is to ensure that we are still around for all the other Jyotis and Deepaks in waiting!
by Anuradha Bakshi | May 28, 2006 | Uncategorized
Wonder what a mundane potato chip and a prayer to God have in common..
Yesterday I had a fall as the old knee gave in resulting in a badly bruised ankle.. An ice pack and bandage later I hobbled to where Utpal was playing.. he stopped and looked at me with a quizzical face.. Upon hearing what had happened he got up and went to a fetch his pack of potato chips and with a serious face took one out and told me to eat it as it would take the hurt away.. then he declared that he would pray to bhagwan to make it all well and turned his little face up, shut his eyes and folding his hands he sent his simple petition to the heavens..
I cannot find the words to express the multitude of emotions that filled me as i watched this little fellow pray.. The room was for that moment in time filled with palpable much energy and divine light..
His prayer finished, little Utpal went back to his toys leaving us all overwhelmed by the power of what had happened..
Needless to say my pain was gone..
God listens to children.. maybe we should too
by Anuradha Bakshi | May 25, 2006 | Uncategorized
Once again the dreaded happened: two young children of india took their lives away in the land capital city because they failed their Boards examinations.
This has been happening with obsessive regularity and yet no one had don anything to put an end to this..
Wonder what goes into the head of a child that makes him take this extreme irreversible step
Is failing in a set of questions in a limited number of subjects – some so inane and useless to life – tantamount to failing in life itself.. is our society so perverse as to judge a human life in whether it knows how to add, or remembers some statistic or the other.. is it the parents who put undue pressure, the peer group or the inadequate opportunities our society gives its members that make a child who has barely taken a few step in life take this momentous decision..
Imagine the sense of despair that the child must feel at that moment..
It is not the child who has failed but we adults who have made the norms of success so narrow and bigoted that they cannot account for those who are otherwise endowed.. Who knows the child who took her life may have turned out to be a musician, an artist or maybe just a good human being, something so rare that we have forgotten its relevance..
I work with people who by our standards are failures as they have never passed an ‘examination’ in their entire lives and yet when one looks at them, one can see that they stand far above what we call successes, maybe not in material terms but in what makes a human being worthy of that name. Mothers who never give up, women who carry on their station in life in circumstances that would make us give up a thousand times, men who toil so that their children can have a better tomorrow, people who may have nothing but are generous to a fault..
What makes my blood run cold is that every year, as if on cue, one or more children take their lives after failing in a school examination and we do nothing barring a few chuckles of sympathy. One child dying for in this way should be enough to make us stand up and do something.. There is something terribly wrong in this numbers game which is foul in more ways than one..
I cannot begin to express the sense of immense let down I feel, when an illiterate parent comes beaming from ear to ear with his child’s school results wanting to share the joy of the child having passed. A glance at the report card where no number exceeds 33 and the words grace marks jump at you, are sufficient to prove the worthlessness of this piece of paper where the word PASS stares at you. You know the child will ultimately go the same way as his parents, as the certificate gathers dust and fritters with age..
What is this pass fail ka khel and can someone change the rules?
by Anuradha Bakshi | May 17, 2006 | Uncategorized
Ram Pyari, Nanhe’s mom had told us that she was off to the village for a few days with Nanhe. We thought nothing of it, though we wondered why she had chosen the hottest month to do so..
Yesterday we were taken aback when she came back and told us that actually she had taken nanhe to Narayan Seva Samsthan’s specialised hospital in Udaipur for his leg surgery.. I remembered her telling me a while back that she had registered at the polio camp held by the Sri Sumathinath Jain Navyuvak Mandal in Delhi last year. At that time we were worried about nanhe’s general condition and I had not given much heed to what she was saying..
Seeing Nanhe back with his smile and a cast on his leg led me to stop what I was doing and savour a very rare moment.. here was a mom saddled by destiny with 3 disabled children, a woman who had lost her husband and who fed her tiny family by selling cucumbers in the day and boiled eggs near the local watering hole at night, a mother who had never given up on her child, no matter how ill or debilitated he was.. one who had found the options possible by herself and left not stone unturned to see her last born walk, even for a short time..
Ram Pyari is a rare woman, one who takes on life with a smile not matter how bad it is, who never gives up and knows that miracles happen when you want them to, and above all that they happen when you have the courage to walk alone.. and a smile like nanhe’s to light the way..
When I come across women like Ram Pyrai, I feel tiny…
by Anuradha Bakshi | May 10, 2006 | Uncategorized
What do ritika, soni, champa and umesh have in common. They are all students of our special section; they are all slow learners and live in a world of their own where things are not quite the same as in ours. They take the same auto every morning under the benevolent care of our forbidding looking Radhey Shyam and spend their day at pwhy, away from their sometimes harsh world.
For a few hours they are in a world where they are treated as individuals and valorised. They spend happy moments till it is time for the return journey.
But ritika, champa, soni and umesh also have something else in common, something their simple minds cannot understand: they live under the dread of having their homes destroyed.. all four are residents of the famous ‘transit’ camps where their parents moved almost 20 years ago, a place given to them by the authorities and which they thought belonged to them, now they have been given demolition notices and told that the space is actually a green belt.. they cannot understand all this.. they simply wonder why they were not able to come to the centre yesterday and no one is willing to explain it to them.. they are unable to comprehend why their parents are angrier than usual, why they did not go to work, why everyone sat on the street and shouted.. why there world was suddenly turned upside down.. mom even forgot to cook…
The mayhem around them is incomprehensible, how are they to uncerstand that the voters ID and tax receipts and other such bits of papers that everyone is holding is of no value anymore, how can they realise that what has been home for as long as they remember might vanish.. how can they begin to imagine how difficult days ahead are going to be as irate and defeated parents will vent their frustration of them.. as always
They simply wait for radhey to come and take them away for a few hours
Note: these four children live in the transit camp that faces demolition by the DDA
