Gandhi Fellowship: From India to Bharat: A Fellowship of the Gandhi Kind

Beyond the realm of armchair talk to walking grassroot realities

The Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF), the first of its kind in India, was conceived by the necessity that preceded it. The necessity spun out of the fact that teachers and headmasters of government schools, though trained well to be inside the classroom, were being deprived of appropriate and adequate training to run a school as an independent unit. This was largely due to a complete absence or careless scarcity of available options in terms of institutions to meet this need. This need was congruent to certain researches that showed that low standards of quality in learning are directly related to low levels of proficiency in running a school.

To strike at the root of this problem, KEF devised the Principal Leadership Development Program (PLDP) in Rajasthan. Only recently garnering state support via an MOU, the PLDP although had unwound its initial stages at the grassroots level since January this year, consolidating the requisite support from the lower echelons of local and district departments up to the state educational departments. This was done from down to up instead of up to down to ensure that sustenance for this initiative remains with the passage of time.

The PLDP ultimately places keen focus on the Headmaster/ Principal as it is believed that if appropriate and adequate assistance to them in the arenas of personal, social, instructional and institutional functioning is provided a change in schools is sure to be noted. The school as a unit is but viewed as a triangle with the HM at the top, the teachers in the middle and the students the largest mass at the bottom. It was logically derived that the HM receiving training from the top would divulge quality for it to filter down to the bottom.
To transport the PLDP from the boundaries of filed papers, posters and spoken word into a breathing reality, the Ajay G. Piramal Foundation supported the creation of the Gandhi Fellowship. This brought together able and compassionate youth from colleges in and around Delhi as fellows, all strung together by the oneness of cause.

Jhunjhunu: More Than A Funny Sounding Word

The coming together of eleven people: all from different backgrounds, all with different utopias, all with different methods in their peculiar madness, all with different passions and biases, but needled into the same thread by the singularity of belief and cause – sustainable change – within the self and in the targeted environment, that of government schools.

Leaving behind friends, televisions, movie halls, malls, cloistered academic lives and everything else urban, apart from the contrast it constantly provides, us folk came around to Jhunjhunu like a breeze here to stay. After excursions into the town and swallowing all of the little it had to offer one felt at home in these new environs. From making friends with the juice and cigarette guy to having made acquaintances of the waiters at the town’s only two restaurants, life here in its limited space has managed to offer endless bounty in terms of peeling new experiences.

It is, however, the incursions into the villages that will not ever be gratified. From earning the wrath of the bus conductor for making anachronistic noise to arguing ceaselessly about the pros and cons of purdah (oppression of the woman to protection from sun), from gazing cows and camels to restless flowers in tranquil landscapes, from smoking cigarettes behind the elaborate pillars of abandoned wells (dhaani) to conversing with heavily jeweled women, and so much more that there will be justice only if it is seen with one’s own eyes and felt by the heart.

After a long day (which would include getting ready, gobbling a quick bite while slowing down for relishing slurps of tea, riding the motorbike at average speed into the assigned village for an assigned task which can range from interaction with the sarpanch to teaching students math, that too in Hindi laced with broken Rajasthani!, coming back home/office, reflecting over the day’s incidents and experiences, sharing it with peers, bitching about the cook’s turmeric dosed food) one finally retires to the room or the roof where the moon and her harem of stars nurse…

Saturday, October 18, 2008

A Fellowship of the Gandhi Kind

Moving beyond Google Earth that initially fueled my imagination about what rustic Jhunjhunu would be like, life here as a Gandhi Fellow has been full of surprises. From conveniently settling into the small town to regular incursions into villages and its schools, this has been way more profound in its impression and impact than the neon rubbish of the cities.

My time here has had me learn self-discipline; unlearn urban behavioral tendencies; and how to strive within means to achieve an end, the end here being quality improvement in village government schools, but never in the process forgetting the self and its capacities for influx and de-flux...

...Gandhi, before turning into a saga, debate and portrait on currency notes, was a man, a man of action and reflection, and that is exactly what one inculcates here.

Breathing here is lung-fulls of fresh air, sights are full of sky and fields, the water is full of taste and the atmosphere is a shade of change.

Abhyudai