I never thought that at the ripe age of 60+ I would be writing a post on colour, I mean the colour of your skin. But in a country where tracking down the robbers and returning the buffaloes to a leading politician has become the top priority of a district police, everything is possible. Apologies for using this example for a post that deals with something as serious as racism, but this is simply to show where our priorities lie. However buffaloes are black and black is not beautiful.

The simple reality is that we are racists though we are not man or woman enough to admit it. Look at our matrimonial ads!

Being different is not easy. I grew up being different and having to fight for my place in the sun. As my parents were diplomatic nomads I was waltzed from country to country every three years. The colour of my skin was never the right one. And what was the worst was that my name which sounded like something out of this planet. As a child I was lucky to find friends who stood by me and made me feel wanted. It was only when I went to boarding school in Switzerland at the age of 15 or so that racism really hit me. My classmates much older than me and from rather rich homes disliked me for being a good student. They made fun of my name, my rather humbler clothes as theirs were branded and ostracized me. In a dining room that had tables for 8, no one sat at my table as I was the ‘noire’, the black one. At 15 it is not easy and I decided to pack up my bags and go home to Ankara where papa was posted.

Later, when I was on the marriage market I was again faced with all this black and white business. Everyone wanted a fair bride. I bore the brunt of some remarks about the colour of my skin and put and end to all this drama and happily found my husband. I know of a dark girl whose family was asked for a car as the girl was so dark! And we say we are not racist.

The incidents that have occurred lately in our capital city targeting Africans and people from the North East have not only touched a chord deep inside me but also saddened me and made me hang my head in shame. What endeared me to my religion as I was growing up in lands of different faiths was the feeling of tolerance I found every time I flung what I thought were trying questions to my parents. Whenever I asked if I could fast with my Muslim friends, go to church with my Christian ones or be part of Sabbath festivities with my Jewish pals, the answer was always a resounding yes and as this game continued I felt stronger in my belief. So when I came across the ugly side of the religion that I had accepted so unconditionally, I was lost. Sadly this sense of loss has deepened as intolerance and aberrations came my way relentlessly.

Today, when I saw that following the terrible death of a young Indian from Arunachal, students from the North East were demanding a law against racism, my heart broke without a sound. Is this the India our forefathers fought for, the India my father told me not to lose faith in shortly before he breathed his last? Is this where we have reached 66 years after Independence?

Our intolerance now seems the rule rather than the exception. The stories that have poured out after the cowardly attack in the middle of the night against young Africans are heart wrenching, more so because that is not who we are. It seems  we have become lulled into stupidity by our so called politicians who have forgotten the spirit of our constitution and decry diversity instead of celebrating it.

Before I carry on, a breaking news that again shows the pits to which we have descended. The buffaloes have been found and 3 cops have been punished for not having done their job promptly enough. This assumes a different proportion in the light of the fact when it comes to dealing with people, the police is to say the least incompetent.

The reason why I am so angry at this intolerance towards people who are different is that I know this is not who we truly are. I would like to share a true life story with you. The story is about Stone, our very first volunteer who was from Uganda. It is true that it took a little time for the community to accept Stone, and it also true that some bad tongues did mention N and H words, but the children accepted him with open arms and as he marched the kids up and down the street, it did not take long for perplexed and even intolerant looks to turn into big broad and welcoming smiles. It was Stone who was the first to open his heart to Manu and to care for him when no one else did, notwithstanding the terrible state he sometimes was in, drenched in his own excrement. Stone would bathe him like you would your own child and never lose his smile. Over the few years he was with us, he not only taught the children but reached out to anyone who needed help. I was quite amused when one day, a woman known for her violence and foul ways slapped a passer by who had dared use the H word for Stone. The morning he left, the whole street was outside and even the most hardened souls were openly weeping. Stone was and African and he was black. As it taken 10 short little years to make us into intolerant wimps too scared to stand up for what is right.

Everything is now a mad scramble for vote banks. Students from the NE began a candle light vigil to seek justice for their murdered kin. Here was a cause to espouse in election times and all political parties jumped in the bandwagon: one aspiring PM screeched his take in a rally, the other chose to sit in with the students, whilst our new CM proposed to make his presence felt today. Where were all these people when a young woman was brutally raped last winter? Oops I guess rape victims are not vote banks to woo.

Will the young boy from Arunachal get justice. I wonder. Will people from the NE get the protection they have been promised is also a big question. Here again it is about changing mindsets and not win to vote banks. I was beside myself when yesterday the coordinator of our women centre told me that some kids were refusing to come to school today as it was Saraswati (Goddess of Learning) puja and they had been told that they were not to touch books and pencils. Now where did this come from and which vote bank does it woo.

Reservations, quotas and affirmative action have become the favoured weapons of our political class even if it goes against the very grain of the Unity and Diversity are kids dutifully learn in their schoolbooks. We are Indians last after being from a city within a state, a caste or sub caste within a religion and so on. And above all we remain stuck on our notion that black is lot beautiful.

The nursery admissions annual nightmare is on. It has had many avatars in the past years, each more ludicrous then the other. In a city where there are 4 tiny tots applying for 1 seat, the odds are really skewed against the poor souls. Over the past years nursery school admission procedures have gone through many mutations and avatars. Each time a problem arises due to the supply and demand situation, a Committee is promptly set and a new set of regulations are made making our children nothing short of guinea pigs. I remember a time when a young woman I knew burst into tears when she came to know she was pregnant. When asked, she answered amidst sobs: I cannot go through a school admission again! I do not blame her as getting your child admitted to school is a herculean task! To give you a taste of what it was 3 years ago in Mumbai, I simply suggest you read this link. This was the time when parents were submitted to a sort of Spanish inquisition. Here is a sampler:

Do you have a PC at home? Are you the carrier of a life threatening disease? How big is your house? What car do you drive? Do you have your tax returns in place? And most importantly, do you have a criminal record? The normal answer would be : this is none of your f****** business!! But beware the wrong answer would deny a place in school to your child.

When the parent’s interview’s were found to be outrageous, a new model was conjured and you had the points system and the possibility of your child being rejected by umpteen schools and the said system was elitist to say the least. Then there was the donation route which again left the humbler children out. All this whilst schools made money hand over fist as they charged greedily for admission forms and you had to fill up umpteen if you wanted to see your kid’s name on the hallowed list. More Committees with unclear terms of reference or should I say hidden agendas. Then came the quota wand! Oh how we love this word: QUOTA! It has been the preferred route of our political masters to muddy waters when they are in a soup. So over and above the points: siblings, gender, alumni, neighbourhood etc there was the management quota that at least protected those who had connections or moolah. It suited some interests.

By this time the debate on neighbourhood school versus 25% reservations for the poor was raging and the later won. Wonder why? Insidious privatisation of education was in full swing instead of the saner option which would have been to improve Government schools and make them a valid option for the the middle class. And therein lies the problem. Everything got lost in translation as inane regulations were drafted and Government schools left to decay. Let us not forget that most of our senior bureaucrats are G school alumni! So quota it was: 25% for the poor and underprivileged and then the point system. Now we all know that we Indian are masters at beating the system. I cannot begin to tell you how many fudged income certificates and tenancy agreement have been made to circumvent the problems. So be it the 25% quota or the neighbourhood points, most of them do not really have the real beneficiaries.

Last week, another bombshell: the scrapping of the management quota. Ouch. It hit where it hurts! And to answer the question our CEO quipped: “Schools are charitable societies and their motive should not be to earn profit. Why are Delhi schools resistant to being transparent? They should not have approached the High court.” I am a bit lost. Education should be run by the State and yet no one talks of revamping the G schools. Now in Delhi, there are Government schools everywhere, almost at walking distance and many have single storied sheds. They have huge grounds and ample space to grow. Instead they are falling apart. Why not look at them and make them the logical option to everyone, and those who have issues about their kids studying with the kids of their staff can built their own gated school. It is time the children of India learned together as it should be and schools became the level playing field. But who will bell the cat.

Till that day, all we will see is more parents harried, more kids suffering and quality education never reaching the child most in need. Let us not forget that parents are now empowered and that even illiterate aspire to a good school for their kids. Education is a a right our kids earned after 6 decades of Independence so please do not botch it for them.

 Today in America, a teacher spent extra time with a student who needed it and did her part to lift America’s graduation rate to its highest levels in more than three decades. This is the way the President Obama began his State of the Union speech. I must confess that I am not interested in American politics, have scant if not no knowledge of economics and other such matters but have admired President Obama’s oratory skills and found inspiration in his speeches. Today his opening words unleashed a torrent of thoughts I could barely control. It is almost the best example of brain mapping one could find and I hope I can put all of it in some coherent way in this post. Please forgive me for the heady cocktail of emotions that I am about to pour out.

(Before we go any further, I would like you to pay a little attention to the picture above. It was taken in our Govindpuri primary class and the teacher you see is Anita one of the first students of Project Why. She joined us when she was in class I and graduated school two years ago. She has been teaching for the past 3 years and is about to complete a Bachelor in Commerce from the Open University. Her father is a contractual worker in a factory and her mother is a housewife. She is an extremely dedicated teacher and has spent many extra hours helping students in need. She came to my mind when I heard Obama’s opening words.)

I heard bits and pieces of the speech as I was going about the morning routine. My mind kept going back to his opening words and suddenly it was like an epiphany that brought some kind of order to the disturbing, angry, sad, despairing and troubling thoughts that I have had in the past weeks as I helplessly watch the political circus and the aberrations that come my way when I flick on a news channel, open the morning paper or browse through a magazine. What you get is a dissonant variation on the same themes. Speeches that mean nothing, sycophancy that makes you gall, promises that are and cannot be kept, vigilantism that makes no sense, protests for to save egos, calls to anarchy, shouting matches on the idiot box, battles over whose statue should be higher, and on the other hand, kangaroo courts that have scant respect for the law of the land and condemn a woman to be gang raped for having loved, courts that uphold antediluvian laws that criminalise a whole section of society for their sexual preferences, bonded labour whose hands are chopped because they dared to speak, a 14 month old girl raped by her father’s friend, homeless dying of the cold in India’s capital city in spite of promises of shelter. The list is endless. Seems like everyone’s priorities are skewed and wrong. It is all about agendas and egos. I almost feel sorry for the desperation to make a statesman out of a reluctant soul because of some feudal and dynastic past we refuse to shed. In our land a beggar’s son has to be a beggar and a leader’s son a leader.

I am sick and tired of all the, moral policing. I was shocked to hear the spokesperson of a leading political party defend her party’s view on homosexuality, a view that reeked of false morality. I am sick of vote bank politics that accept denying basic human rights to people who hurt no one.

For the past weeks I have been wondering why I am so disturbed. It was Obama’s words that made me realise why. If you think of any recent speech by the PM, by aspiring PMs, by leader of political parties, any political debate on TV and so on you realise that you never hear anything about education, or of you do it is yet another promise that will remain just that. Obama began his speech by talking of a teacher and a student and the need to lift graduation levels. He had his priorities right. Change, empowerment can only happen when people get education and not the kind of literacy that we see in India, where writing your name makes count as ‘literate’.

 What we hear in our political firmament is one person attacking his opponent time after time, or vague promises of empowering large sections of society like the women and youth (they form the largest vote banks). No one tells us how. We never hear of education because children are not vote banks. We do not hear of malnutrition that stunts the development of children, of hunger that makes women ferret rat holes for grain. We never hear anyone telling us they will ensure that every child will go to school including the child who begs at red lights and that no one will go to sleep hungry. Hunger is something that deprives you of every shred of dignity as you spend every living minute thinking of food and how to feed your children.

The women, the youth you want to empower can only become empowered if they are not hungry, if they have a roof on their heads. And once you have dealt with hunger, the first step to empowerment is education and unless you address that problem India cannot change. We all should be ashamed of the state of our education.

I have written ad nauseum about the state of our education as I have, for the past 14 years, seen every aspect of what we call education in India, beginning from the aberration of a paltry 33% to acquire a certificate or degree that gets you nothing to the pathetic and shameful state of state run schools. I have also witnessed the heart breaking hunger for learning in every child that has come to project why. I have seen failures become toppers with just a gentle push and spent many a sleepless night wondering how could help more such children with the meagre resources at my disposal.

Education in India is abysmal. It is not I alone who says that. A UNESCO report published yesterday states that even after completing four years of school, 90% of children from poorer households remain illiterate. And this also holds true for around 30% of kids from poorer homes despite five to six years of schooling. This in spite of all the policies, Acts of Parliament and promises we are now sick of hearing. And as for the women that one of our aspiring PM wants to ’empower’, if things remain as they are the richest young women have already achieved universal literacy, the poorest are projected to do so only by 2080. That is 66 years down the line.

Simply sending children to school and giving yourself a pat in the back is not enough. With the no fail policy till class VIII you now have children who will spend 8 years on a school bench and still be illiterate though they will have a certificate saying they are class VII passed!

The same report also states that India has the highest population of illiterate adults: India has the highest population of illiterate adults, 287 million, 37% of the total population of such people across the world, according to Unesco’s Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring report.

Every time we eat out we pay an education cess of 3%. I realised this a few days back. Where does the money go? It is shameful that in India’s capital city we cannot send all our children to school in the most productive hours ie mornings. Our boys go to school after 1pm when the girls have finished their shift. Schools still run in barracks or even tents and in the open come rain, sunshine or cold. Over 100 children are crammed in a class meant for 40 kids. What kind of enabling environment is this. It takes court interventions to get drinking water or acceptable toilets. And no one cares.

I feel both humbled, blessed, frustrated and elated at the fact that for the past 14 years we have been reaching out to an average of 600 kids a year. Today our headcount is 1000 but will not remain so for long as we have limited resources and the cost of living will compel us to cut our numbers in order to retain our staff.

I wish people who have deep pockets understood the importance of education and reached out to those like us who have our priorities right and helped us. But it is simply banging your had against a wall and no matter how hard a nut you have, there comes a time when it hurts and you give up.

So when I see what is happening I see red. A government we elected because we thought it may be different has lost its way. And unless they too have an epiphany, we are condemned to more of the same.

What have the children of India done to deserve this fate. Stupid me. We are feudal and a beggar’s child has to remain just that: a beggar’s child!

Anyone who has a modicum of decency, a grain of compassion and a tiny bit of heart should hang her/his head in shame on the eve of our 65th celebration of our Constitution. A magazine that has hit the stands today and is not yet fully on line though you can read parts of it at this link, chose to place some very disturbing figures on its cover along the title: India’s lost children. 38% of our children are forced into sex trade, 23% are forced into domestic servitude, 4% routed to work at hotels and hospitals, 3% shackled at sweetmeat and garment units. Please buy a copy of The Week and read on if you have the guts to do so. An article on how child traders chose their victims made me physically sick. Here is a screenshot of the beginning of the article so that you understand

 God to whom little boys say their prayers has a face very like their mother’s wrote Sir James Barry. I had written a post with the same title way back in 2007 when Utpal was just 5. At that time we still believed we were miracle makers and the day would come when the little lad would one day have his mom just to himself. But God had other plans. Today Utpal is almost 12. For the past 5 years he has not heard from his mom who left one day and never even called to ask about her son. In the meantime I got his legal guardianship. He battled his demons in his own way. Not getting the answers he wanted because we did not have them, he resorted to challenging behaviour and aggression. With love and patience we helped him craft a new set of relationships and slowly he began to accept us and think of our home as his. 

But the God to whom little boys say their prayers has a face very like their mother’s, and he was just that: a little boy. Last week I had gone shopping with him as I needed a frame for a picture. While I was going about my work, he came to me with a frame in his hand. The frame was an accordion like one with place for 4 pictures. He told me he wanted it. I asked him whose pictures we wanted in them and he said in this other: My mummy, Maam’ji, Agatya and Sirji  (husband). I was stunned, moved and angry. Angry because I had just come to know that his mother had come back and remarried a man with 3 children; moved by the fact that he had not forgotten her and stunned because it had been a long time since he had mentioned her. 

His counsellor has advised us not to tell him about the mother and the new family, he is just entering his teens and has moved school and is still dealing with the bullying he had to suffer in his previous school. The court too felt the same way. We will need to tread slowly as the last thing he needs is for his life to be turned on its head.

Moms sometimes do not realise how much their child loves them, even if they have been abusive or unkind. I have made his little frame and will give it to him when I go and visit him.