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.