by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 10, 2006 | Uncategorized
Sandhya landed up at hearfix hotel today.. a little 6 year old she needs heart surgery and her parents took all the initiatives and got her checked… something we are pleasantly surprised about as often parents give up, particularly when the child is a girl..
They tarvelled the now famous road to heartFix hotel, one that passes by all previous innmates under the benevolent guidance of my friend the God of lesser beings..
We now need to raise the 66 000 required! are you listening mr god
I hope that sandhya makes it as we were all sad to learn that it was too late for bright Nandini. Maybe when she is 40.. said the doctor .. 40 in a village in Bihar is when you are a grandmother.. I hope her family will understand that the best for her is to be able to study and get a job.. I fear they will marry her and she will have children.. and push her exhausted heart to the brink..
Nandini is condemned to a life where she will have to be careful, where breathing will be an uphill task, where she may not be able to do all she wants to.. but we must see that sandhya who is barely 6, gets a better chance in life
mr god of lesser beings are you listening..
by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 10, 2006 | Uncategorized
(in the previous post we tried to imagine what a child’s tomorrows may look like, if the persent situation continued; let us now imagine how things can change..)
M’s or s’s tomorrow can be safe.. but if many ifs happen! So let us take it from the top again..
Their tomorrows will be safe if a common school comes into being, if they are taught their rights and their duties as citizens; if they are taught about existing institutions, if they are taught the reality that nothing come easy.
Their tomorrows will be safe if the lure of government jobs is demystified, if they are given the right skills to return to their villages and habitats of origin; if they learn to respect Nature, if they are taught to respect one another, to celebrate differences.
But this no mean task and one has to tread slowly. Today children are still under the spell of cityLights and maybe not willing to listen. But one has to start weaving te web and using every possible to pass on messages..text books have to be rewritten and lessons that show little ramu the village cousin be shown the magic of the city by little manoj should be reversed..
A long way to go, but one that has to be walked.. one step at a time so that M’s tomorrows are safe
by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 9, 2006 | Uncategorized
M is busy learning.. he is lost in his own world, and as serious about his work as any other child.. wonder what is going on in his little head..
If we look around us, it is difficult to predict what might happen to M, who belongs to a poor migrant labour family.. but let us give it a try:
He could become be the President of India, or an unemployed daily wage labourer.. or maybe something in between, let us say the equivalent of what would be in times to come the equivalent of a courrier boy.. as that seems to be a great favourite these days..
Along the way, he may dream of being a cricketer or a film hero.. as these seem to be the few role models left.. parents and teachers have lost the right to being those one aspires to emulate.. anger and frustration can make him want to be a cop or a politician.. but the wrong kind.. and then dreams fade as reality bites, and one takes on what one can get… an infernal spiral that makes you the part of the faceless crowd..
There are other possibilities, far grimmer ones, also fuelled by dreams – of a cellphone, a dazling bike a MP3 player, a credit card, and M could then be swayed by some extremist group and adopt wrong ways and find himself part of some misguided pack.
And even if M held on bravely and continued to learn he could be one of the kids who made this chilling headline in the national press this morning: Another exam suicide…the fourth this month.
Strange that the four children belonged to different social backgrounds from the rich upmarket child, to the poor slum kid, joined on the way by a middle class girl, all united in their fear of failing..
(to be continued..)
by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 9, 2006 | Uncategorized
Welcome to why house – for want a better name – this where we will soon be moving, or at least part of us.. this is also a transition time for pwhy.
We at pwhy have always held that children from all walks of life should attend regular school. schools run by the state as that is the only way of ensuring that every child born in India can have access to its right to education, one that the constitution guarantees.. we have more than once voiced our concern at the slowly emerging pattern of privatisation of schools and setting up of parallel second rate systems for the under-privileged child.. that is why we ensure that all our children are mainstreamed into the existing system.. our task his to help them succeed and hence contain drop out rates..
Our first task was to prove to ourselves and others that we could do this with resources drawn from within the community we work with and; it is a matter of pride to say that we had a 99% result in the 6 years of our existence.. It is now time to fine tune our model.
why house will house our babies and special kids but all our primary centres will now be in the field, so that we can slowly create new ones and reach out more children with minimum costs.. taking us slowly to the day where we hope the community will raise the basic costs and we will act as a training-cum-monitoring vehicle.. and provide the add ons..
Our secondary outreach which will soon become self-sufficient will continue where it is.
by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 8, 2006 | Uncategorized
Jump for my love.. said the pointer sisters in their famous song!
Wonder what A is jumping for…
A is an autistic child and lives locked in his world that no one understands.. not even his own family.. his mother loves him but does not know how to, his father does not have time for his antics..
At pwhy he is happy because we make an effort of entering his world and we do not check him for what may seem strange to others.. we know it is just his way of expressing himself.. for some time now we have been aware that A sometimes does not know how to deal with his abundant energy.. when a friend asked us if there was anything we would like to have, we thought of a trampolin knowing that the kids would love it..
At first hesiatnt the children soon caught the trick but it was A who took to the trampolin like a fish to water.. and he jumped, higher and higher, finally finding a way to release all that pent up energy, one that would not entail any censure or reprimand..
by Anuradha Bakshi | Mar 4, 2006 | Uncategorized
I have always been fascinated by the theory of synchronicity. One of the definitions I like is the following: ” Synchronicities are people that come your life to help you evolve or to place emphasis on something going on in your life. “
I sat this afternoon taking a break from things and zapping TV channels.. two of them caught my attention and interest: the replay of Dead Man Walking and an interview of Dionne Bunsha on the relase of her book: Scarred – experiments with violence in Gujarat. In the former Susan sarandonm was desperately trying to find some way finding a shred of good in the condemned man, and in the later the young journalist was trying to expain that even the worst perpetrators of injustice were convinced they were doing something good. “They are people who see themselves as some sort of Robin Hoods working for the betterment of their religion.”
The little hands in the picture are today raised to show off the paint smeared on them after a fun painting session.. tomorrow the same hands can lend their support to fight for justice like jessica lal’s or to lend support to some destructive mission fuelled by misguided robin hoods! Lst week, when we asked who George Bush was, little 10 years olds said in unison: an international terrorist.. the reason being the innumerable posters plstered all over the slums saying so.
Every day one is made aware of the frightening reality of young people becoming prey to misguided propaganda. This more so in urban slums where life for young boys is not easy and tentations many so the lure of a mobile phone, a bike, a CD player, a credit card can make regular kids into potential criminals… We have seen this happening with dubious pyramid selling agencies who seek out the most vulnerable and offer them the moon!
There is an abundance of energy that exists in kids living in the highly charged atmosphere of urban slums, an energy that is ready to be tapped.. and many are aware of this. It is never the leader who pulls the trigger or plants the exploding device.. they neeeds hands to do so.. hands that today maybe smeared with paint but who knows what will happen tomorrow..
It is our duty as a civil society to do something today and now!
