Skip to main content

COOKING UP A TOUGH LIFE - CONTINUED

This desire to not let the ball drop is egging us on. This time, Ramanan & I went over to Prerana's office last evening. Prerana (introduced to me by both Madhulika and Kab) is an NGO that is doing yeoman service in educating meritorious students from financially disadvantaged families.





The idea was to meet Mr. Pramod Kulkarni who founded Prerana over a decade ago in Banashankari, Bangalore, to figure out ways we could work together. We came back with loads of ideas, dos and don'ts, and enormous respect for the man who is quite literally building lives and giving hopes to talented youngsters. 
I won't bore you with the details of our conversation, but we now have some good inputs to start the organisation we desire to start, helping disadvantaged children get education - a slight departure from Prerana's focus on meritorious students.
Three girls who are finishing their 12th grade thanks to Prerana happened to be at the Prerana office. Pramod, Mr. Nagarajan a donor, Ramanan, I, four of the girls, and a mother all sat in a circle in a small room. Then each girl started talking about her family background, how she came in touch with Prerana, how the NGO counselled, provided financial help, provided soft skills & spoken english training, monitored progress, convinced the family see merit in her continuing studies, and ensured that she remained focused on school. Each of them is of course a high achiever. But the heart-wrenchingly nice stuff were something else - well turned out girls, confident, extremely positive, not using their family situation as a crutch, and talking about their ambitions. One wants to be a bio-technologist, one an electronics engineer, one is swinging between med school & math major, and the fourth is not sure at all; three of the four wants to invent stuff that will help humanity in a big way. None may at all, but who am I to judge - I liked the spirit.
I walked away phenomenally charged, and doubly certain that it is now up to us to make this dream of ours happen. Wish us luck, folks.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NINE FOLKS IN A BOAT

Sundarbans. 27 th December, 2016 Just as the needle edged past ten p.m. on a still, dark, moonless night, a small fishing boat slid silently out of its berth, with a party of nine aboard – the boatman, the tour guide, and seven wide-eyed city-bred men & women. As the boat swished its way into the deep and murky waters of the Gangetic delta, it kicked off two of the most magical hours I’ve ever spent in my life. A few hours back, eighteen tired bodies had returned to our temporary home in the Sundarbans eco village, after a ten-hour day on a modified fishing trawler, touring the various islands of Sundarbans, wonderously taking in the flora and fauna that the mangroves offered. After resting our tired limbs for a few minutes on bamboo beds in our room, we headed to the dining hut fifty yards away. Mowgli (yes, he is one of the threesome that runs this very interesting tour/village) and Om were on hand, dishing out plates-full of piping-hot pakoras and black tea (milk is a ...
6 comments
Read more

The Trials Of A Hospital Discharge

I have the highest respect for doctors and the medical profession. Yes, there is incompetence in the healthcare system, but just like bad doctors, there are bad bankers, and bad accountants, and bad engineers. Unscrupulous professionals also exist in every sector, including healthcare; a large swathe of health care professionals are however true to their profession, helping humanity.  From my own experiences since 2012, I am less likely to say the same about Indian hospitals, and their administrative systems though. The need for rapid growth, fame, maximising profits, and increasing shareholder value seems to drive bad behaviour and flimsy systems - of opaqueness, unfair pricing, uncalled-for cost escalations, etc. And if one does not have insurance cover, one is left to fend for oneself.   Between 2011 & 2014, when my dad was hospitalised several times, I never questioned the honesty of the system, and paid every bill presented to me, promptl...
7 comments
Read more

Nutty Breaks

It was 1985..or was it ’86? We were four to five young working professionals sharing a fantastic pad in Juhu, Mumbai. Each of us had moved into our second jobs, were flush with funds, were not spendthrifts, loved to cook our dinners at home, preferred to sit at home with friends and drink, instead of hanging around in either seedy or expensive pubs, and loved to leave the city on weekends. It was always the same - we would come back from work tired on a Friday night, sit around with a drink in hand, chatting, and suddenly one of us would have a bright idea. “Bore ho raha hai yaar, lets go somewhere.” So the next 30-minutes would be spent discussing options, and finally the guy with the loudest and firmest voice that night would get his way. Ganeshpuri, Vajreshwari, Lonavla-Khandala, Igatpuri, Mahabaleshwar-Panchgani, Nashik, Goa, Ratnagiri-Chiplun, Murud-Janjira, and a dozen other trips always happened that way.  So it was that Friday night too. “Alibagh” proclaimed Ramesh. It ...
2 comments
Read more