A Home Where You Are Always Welcome

“Do you know how an oyster makes his shell?”

“No. Do you?”

“Me neither. But I know why a snail carries its house on its back." 

"Why?" "

So that he always has a roof over his head"

A smile on your lips is nowadays difficult to play by, leave alone making an extra effort to make someone else smile. In a world plagued with concerns over Ebola or the growing unrest in the middle-east, one would not hesitate to second such an opinion. After a couple of years as an undergraduate student and a year as an “adult” by now, it comes to me as a great surprise that I should feel content and ecstatic on a day that is completely aloof from my age and activities. A day I celebrated for the first time of my life as the Children’s day.

While I was stuffing my bag along with Zinya and Tarun, I never realized that I was filing it not with crayons and colors but with expectations, expectations of the kids we have so grown fond of. The day indeed matured as colorful and as beautiful as the greeting cards and clay models the young artists had designed, the best out of waste was not the creative things they did with junk around them, but what they did with my day, they made it “best out of waste” indeed!!

It was high school all over again as I nearly was an object of fist fight yet again as Dilip (a 7^th class kid) declared that I was his best friend, but to Ranjith (another 7^th class kid) the statement did not sound pleasing and spoke he his own disposition, my best efforts to make him understand that I was the best friend of both Ranjith and Dilip was in vain, because he strongly believed that one person must be entitled to only one best friend! Finally, the matter was amicably resolved when Ranjith reluctantly settled for Tarun’s pitch to be his best friend. 

The motivation towards volunteering for the NoteBook Drive was my own attitude that a practical interest in educating the children of our country should be one of the elementary obligations that must devolve on every thinking man in India and so, it began. This social activity for me is not a display of sentimental charity, which is ridiculous and useless, but an attempt to perpetuate the elimination of fundamental deficiency in our economy and society, a deficiency that is bringing about the degradation of our country.

But, now what makes me volunteer is not my philosophy but a new relationship that I have developed. A relationship with no demands, a relationship that has made me realize that that I may not be widely loved but I am loved deeply. A relationship that calls me home, where I know I am always expected.

Road to Reality

The road was overpopulated with vehicles; it was a hard ordeal to maneuver my bicycle between autos and cars amidst angry honking, as I hurried to catch up with Sabreesh.

“You can write about today in your blog” he mentioned.

“I intend to” I replied and had already made up my mind that I would, as we hurried back into the campus to attend our humanities class.

It was my second visit along with the members of the Notebook Drive (NBD) to a school nearby to teach kids.  I was very proud of what my fellow students did as a part of NBD and I felt this practical interest in educating the children of our country should be one of the elementary obligations that devolve on every thinking man in India.

Once, inside the classroom, I could not help thinking about the new little friends I made today, the buzzing activity, their excited voices, the pleading innocent eyes that wanted us to stay for some more time, the hesitant goodbyes and the silent promise to meet them again the next week.

In retrospect, I was reminded of my own childhood and it made me wonder, have they got dreams like us? Do they tell their mothers that one day they want to make rockets or a time machine? How would their mother respond? Does she smile and nod her head in agreement? Or does she kiss her little child and reassure him saying “I am sure you will”? Or was she so busy with her chores or doing some odd jobs to raise a little more money for her family that her children lay neglected. What about the Father?  Would he be a kind and an understanding man? Was he a man who could look beyond the misery of the present day towards a better future for the prodigy? Does he understand the value of education? Or is he a hated man who maltreats the family in a fit of drunken rage?

How was the ambience at home? Was there a possibility of learning any lessons at home or was it just restricted to what little the young citizen learns to read and write at school? How was the influence of the teacher, how were they perceived at the child’s home? Were they highly spoken of or were they being denigrated so much so that the child is more inclined to insult the teacher and disregard respect for the human surroundings?

And in this process what happens to their dream? Was fate so cruel, that it tiptoes in, at first unheeded and wearing a prosaic scabbard from which, later, emerges a fiery sword that cuts the last thin thread that holds their small dreams above the ground. Was there any hope to escape the clutches of the goddess of fate that firmly held them in her hands and threatened to crush them any minute now? Whatever happens to our next Dr. Abdul Kalam and his wings of fire? That is when one starts to look out for something to reprimand and that is when you tag them as the victims of a system, and the natural scape goat happen to be a politician.

Politicians had promised to fight, fight illiteracy, fight poverty, but of course, they cannot fight, because you fight for something you love, for loving something you must respect and in order to respect, you must have knowledge of it. And this knowledge cannot be attained from the heaps of folders jam-packed with mathematical figures and diagrams dumped on the desk of a man too busy fighting for his own survival. Nor could it be gained by ”visits”, for which so much hype is created about. Such conventions lead only to superficial talk and sentimental delusions. The former never ventures into the root of the problem while the latter simply evades it. Both meaningless and unnecessary and therefore would serve no better purpose than for a heart touching campaign speech to move voters with a meticulously stitched glitter of words.

Were we politicians, we would have probably left the kids to their own fate or would have made them the instruments to highlight the inefficiency of the Government to propagate our own cause for the elections. Fortunately we aren’t. We are the ones who have realized not to rely on the men with power to act, for they are too busy trying hard to stay in power and in this course have marred their own sensitivity towards the others.

Our actions may go unnoticed; our actions may not bring about a grand change; our actions may have little significance on a longer scale but atleast we ACT!