Salute to my friend at Sunaay

I live in the heart of India in New Delhi and that too in upwardly mobile South Delhi. Whenever we meet our friends and associates over dinner at our place or we get together we, being India’s intellectual middle class euphemistically called intelligentsia, discuss India’s economy, its polity, social ills, religion and politics, far right versus left liberals and everything that, in our eyes, other less educated or less fortunate people normally don’t when they meet their friends. We are a part of that segment of affluent (actually unfortunately on the fringes), educated Indians who are very meaningfully engaged with the country and its problems when it comes to giving lip service and providing lofty verbal utopian solutions. We are experts in criticizing everything sitting in our comfortable drawing rooms and sipping our new found taste for single malts or unpronounceable wines, smugly attired in our branded designer clothes and clutching on to our  fancy phones and bags with our diamond studded fingers. The other day we discussed the budget in all the earnestness that we could muster over drinks and snacks, along with discussing venues for our forthcoming summer vacations. In the background our very erudite and amiable looking chief economic advisor was beaming on the TV screen, very graciously accepting congratulations from industry leaders and TV studios’ staple celebrities, with Arnab for a change not over the top in his usual fit of uprighteousness but strangely giving just a knowing smile. There was euphoria visible in TV studios on all channels as the budget was being hailed as pro poor and pro rural India, which was a very pleasant respite from the raving and ranting that was dominating the discussions last week over free speech and sedition issues. Now those had become stale issues and the budget was the newest toy that everyone wanted to play with.

I came across a piece of statistics which I thought was a little alarming given our democratic, socialistic antecedents. The Gini Coefficient was on a rise in these last few years, meaning that disparity between the rich and the poor in this country was on a rise. The poor are becoming poorer and the rich richer, reaffirming the old saying money begets money. I can actually see it all around,…the disparity increasing.

From our balcony, for about a month now, I can see a motley group of slum kids very religiously gather about ten in the morning for about two hours. These kids are taught by very modestly attired and seemingly very modestly educated women coming from the adjacent slums. I soon figured that this is another branch of Sunaay that a friend of mine had opened near her house for the kids of maids and drivers and other casual labour who do not go to school for whatever reasons. I remember when she started  Sunaay four or five years ago, I thought that she was doing a great job but that these days everyone almost everyone went to school so she would not have many takers.  She obviously had done her home work very well and knew that there are enough kids who are out of school and are left alone in their houses, if the tenements they live in can be called houses, without any supervision for most part of the day. Slightly older kids look after their younger siblings and these kids are left to fend for themselves while their mothers work as household maids in the nearby residential colonies.  She was very clear that she wanted these kids to come to her so that they could be taught basic literacy and hygiene. She had a dream in her eyes. She wanted to bring alphabet and numbers to their lives along with some cheer. She worked hard, got in touch with whoever she thought would be willing to help in whatever way and started to run this school. She would rope in her doctor friends to do medical check-ups, musician friends to sing for these kids and corporate friends to organize picnics and food for them. She would never force anyone to help her. I really liked her modus operandi. I can call myself a good friend of hers but never did I once feel the pressure to help her out even when I left my work.  She would discuss her work with me whenever I would ask or when she would have something special to share. The only time I recall she wanted me to intervene was to trouble shoot on her behalf when she faced opposition from some people living in the area she was working in. Today she runs three such branches with a very healthy presence of kids across all age groups and has people approaching her from adjacent slum clusters to open similar branches in their areas too. She seems to have developed a very simple model whereby she gets in touch with educated women in the slums and with their help motivate kids who do not go to school to come to her classes for two hours everyday.  She pays these women out of the resources she so painstakingly gathers and accumulates to meet her running expenses.

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Today I realize fully the importance of work that she has been so selflessly doing all these years.  I am amazed at the number of kids who do not go to school at all or who drop out in primary classes only, in a place like Delhi. Here we moan about high costs of summer schools and undergraduate courses in US and UK universities and lament that these schools are meant for seriously rich people, while just below our nose there are kids who do not even get to a primary school to get basic education.  There were kids who didn’t go to school even when we were kids and our parents were our age, but then our parents never discussed summer schools or Ivy Leagues for us. These things were not even in the realm of their imagination.  So we have moved on and marched ahead, more so after the economic liberalization, but the kids of the kids of our generation who didn’t go to school, are still not going to school. The gap has very visibly increased. We have marched ahead not because we inherited legacies but because we got good education and then good jobs. We are now providing to  our kids world class education and they will obviously go much farther…

What do we do as citizens to bridge this gap? Absolutely nothing except discussing these disparities with a lot of passion and theatrics when we meet our friends.  We castigate the government, rue the fact that we are one of the most corrupt people, punch holes in our systems, cry ourselves hoarse over crony capitalism, nepotism and lack of integrity in general but never introspect and analyse in terms of what we can contribute towards building a better society. I am increasingly getting averse to social dos and meeting people where we just discuss problems and blame everyone else for everything that goes wrong except our own selves. I feel happier when I am in the company of people who walk their talk in whatever little way. I must admit I too belong to the category of all talk and no walk; maybe I change that soon by keeping good company.

I want to salute this friend of mine who is the brain and heart behind Sunaay, because she is doing an absolutely tremendous job.  We need more people who can get out of their comfort zones forget themselves and their families, kids and their worries for a while every day and do whatever little they can to contribute towards building a little better, a little less unequal society, apart from working for their own welfare all the time.