It Is Done ! :)

Long ages ago - when Blackberry wouldn't advertise, Rakhi Sawant was a minor nuisance, Ali couldn't get married - I had written a post about "Vakola ke Chiraag".

Today, it gives me great pleasure to share that it is done ! :)

we took our first class on 5th of October 2010, and we have had classes every weekday since then....thats a solid 2 months of tremendous support and commitment from my colleagues in APL.

The support from my friends in Asian Paints has been simply amazing !

They have supported me and held me to account.

Whenever I have had the silent, sinister urge to just take it easy for a while and let things drift they have jerked me back to the game that we are upto, the difference we are out to make.

Its a team of 15 teachers now (3 every day - 1 each for class 4, 5 and 6) and there are 15 to 18 students who turn up regularly...

From what we have heard from other well established NGOs doing similar stuff we must have done a real great job to have kept the students interested for so long.........and yes, there is still a long way to go.....we need to keep on figuring out how to teach Maths to these predominantly Tamil medium students......how do we start making English more real and easy for them......and so on.....and we are on it......we are making progress....and in each class we are making a difference, how so ever slight, how so ever minuscule, but it is a grain in the right direction......

We have also had one meeting with an amazingly energetic lady by the name of Prachi Mangaonkar who is with an NGO called Akanksha who in half an hour's time made it quite clear for me as to what needs to be done...

I am attaching here a couple of pics I took in today evening's class.......the only adults u see in these pics are Gopal M V (he has never missed a class !) and Kiran (our 1st teacher) from my office and Nagappa Ji, a a man held in great esteem by the community these kids come from and who offered us the temple premises and set this teaching thing going..................more to come as we roll along....

P.S. - Darn !!!! I still dont know how to arrange the pics in my blog......guess i just have to wait for that level of enlightenment for a while.....

PFMS redefined

Sometimes you have these amazing conversations in office...when seeking respite from the relentless summer of work you seek shade under an aimless chitchat and to your great surprise a juicy fruit of conversation falls into your lap.....I just thought they might make for interesting reading.....Here is the first in the series...

Since these conversations originate in real life, they have that peculiar quality of real life as well......any sense of direction and coherence is purely a coincidence and there is no The End, no definite closure, no Happily or Sadly Everafter......so one will have to contend with the open-endedness of these blogs.

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Saturday afternoon.

If there had been a clock in my office it would have been striking two.

That day of the week and that time of the day when self-respecting south indians lie supine, eyes half-closed, meditating on the divinity of curd rice sitting deep inside their hairy tummies.

And here I was, in my office, fighting my battles against stock-outs, marshaling my tanks....er, oil tankers....., shouting commands to my generals...er...vendors....

And I get this ping from one of my colleagues....for the sake of anonymity and out of sheer survival instincts I will call him here GM.

Now GM is one of those people who remind you of those extremely competitive and extremely studious kids at school...who are often portrayed in movies with oil-slicked hair and big spectacles and nerdy dialogues....but our GM in addition to (probably) being all those things is also a good sport.....with a taste for verbal fencing....

And GM had just been back from a (sponsored) trip to the Vegas.

I mention sponsored here, because otherwise what GM did there in Vegas he didn't have to go to Vegas for doing.........attend business seminar, have good vegetarian food, relax, sleep and come back home.....no gambling, no bars - the strip kind or otherwise.

And here is what followed....

GM - what are you doing!!!

Me - sitting in office, reading my blog

wat ru doing online?

chatting with the women u made friends with in vegas?

GM - hmm...

but... u readinng your own blog...

Me - yes...

GM - on DCO std oil?

Me - hehe

patthar ka jawab eent se....sahi sahi...

GM - saale... eet ka jawaab pathar se... misaal tosahi diyaa karo!

Me -

misaal ekdum sahi di hai bhai..

vegas ki women kahan aur dco stand oil kahan...

GM -

hmm...good one...you plan your honeymoon at Vegas na...

Me -

fir honeymoon me hi divorce ho jayega

GM -

expectation management kaa baat hai

like PFMS

(now PFMS is the dirty little Big trick that HR plays on all employees of our company......when completely unfurled it reads Performance Focused Management System.....but when read closely it is deciphered as "No, you are not that good, but we will tolerate you")

Me -

agar biwi ko vegas leke gaya na honeymoon pe to PFMS ka matlba hi badal jaayega

it will become

Piranha Female Murders Spouse

GM -

haha

PV -

ye to sahi ek aur blog ka material ho gaya

Vakola ke Chiraag - Tadaaaaaaannnnn!!!! The Introduction.

I thought it was going to be easy.

Yeah, I really thought so.

I am part of a small miracle in Mumbai called “walking to office from home”.

No being squished like a pancake in the locals - where your chest finally gets to touch your own back and you start wondering whether intestines, lungs, heart are all just concepts and not real things. Well, if they were real shouldn't they have been turned to juice with all that pushing and squishing that happens...or maybe its all that packing of vada paavs inside which cushions the insides from turning to a missal-like consistency.

No getting stuck in traffic jams with your car.

Just a simple walk.

I live in Vakola, behind the Grand Hyatt Hotel and work with Asian Paints, which is bang in front of Grand Hyatt. So, it’s like a walk of 5 minutes (though that has not prevented me from taking rides from bewildered auto-wallahs to just make it in time to office) from home to office.

Everyday when I walk to office I pass by a group of make-shift slums – not the kind of settled, structured slums that you normally see around apartments in Mumbai, but really make-shift slums.

It’s a colony of ragpickers.

A lot of them sleep on mats/bedsheets right out on the road.

And I never much thought about them. They were as much a given and inconsequential part of the background of my life as were the other absolute strangers I passed by daily on my way to the office.

Until I started my SELP program with Landmark Education.

Now this is a very powerful education for life and in SELP one is supposed to take up a community project.

I love teaching and I was convinced that the kids living in this slum would definitely not be going to school, and hence, if a group of my colleagues from Asian Paints join in this project with me it would have a big impact on the lives of these kids.

So, there it was – my project is to teach these kids with a group of my Asian Paints colleagues.

And our project name - “Vakola Ke Chiraag”.

I know, it’s a little too dramatic and has the cheap flourish of one of (actually, any of) Ekta Kapoor’s serials.

There are 3 areas to be addressed before this project actually becomes a reality –

1) Form a group of 5 – 7 people from Asian Paints who would be willing to give an hour a week (from 7.30 pm to 8.30 pm) to teach these kids

2) Find a place to teach these kids at night

3) Design the curriculum

I was simply amazed by the easy, large generosity of my colleagues whom I approached to be a part of this project. Now we are a group of 5 people – and trust me, 5 very interesting people (if I were to just write about their idiosyncrasies here I bet you this blog would be bought over and turned into a syndication) - committed to making a difference to the lives of these kids.

Now the next big thing to close is to find a room to teach these kids at night.

And boy, oh boy, am I running around here.

I have visited a couple of convent schools in my area who directed me to BMC schools who were extremely cooperative and polite in telling me that they can lend out their rooms only to NGOs.

So, I am actually a little stuck here.

And today I am going to talk again to one of those convents. Fingers crossed.

And I thought it was easy to just get a room, find kids to be taught and people to teach them.

I really thought it was easy.

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This, my lovely blog here, which has endured my long periods of absence, my vulgar jokes, my benumbing PJs, my dazzling, insightful moments of pristine vapidity (yeah, I know, she sounds like the devout wife of this degenerate Thakur) - is going to be a chronicle of our journey as we relocate the existence of this project from paper to real, physical life.