waaassup??

This is an attempt to write a post when i really don't have anything in my head that i wana write about. Whether m gonna publish this post is something that i'll decide on later :P

So tomorrow is rakshabandhan and i am home for the festival. I have been home for a lonng weekend, i am fatter than i was 4 days ago and i am looking forward to my cousin's and paternal aunts' visit which is due tomorrow morning. 

I feel really lucky for even at the age of 24 i get to have so much of family time. That's because i work in Delhi which is at a 4 hour drive from my home sweet home and owing to the small distance, i come home every friday. Its like stating the obvious but, the best feeling in the world is when you know that everyone you love is safe and sound, is around to talk to, to watch tv with, to fight with. Home endows you with a peace of mind which can not be attained otherwise.

Its ironic that back in childhood, such times seem to last forever and now they have become a luxury for most of the people in my age group. I mean at present i know some of my friends and cousins who have not spent time with their entire family since as long as an year! Thats true, in some cases life engages one so heavily in making a living, and in other cases, one chooses to be away for fun or whatever reasons, that family time just becomes a thing of the past, of the so called good old days. 

I never want to use the phrase- the good old days, i hope life does not drift me away from my family. Although i have plans for further studies, i'll not be away for the long haul. Ill get over with the padhai shadhai asap and will be back here, in my room which i share with my devilish twin siblings, who often blackmail me with the 'teko ma kasam! maggi bana de' at 2 am in the night. And i would know that ma pa are sleeping in the next room and that i must shut down my lapy and call it a day before 4 am coz that's the time when grandpa wakes up! These times are very precious and ill not let go of them.

I am kinda feeling grateful and happy and hungry.. i guess ill just publish this one before i grab something to eat from the kitchen.

Goodnight all. Sweet dreams! And Happy Rakshabandhan, i hope you'll all have an awesome time.

Over n out!

Nayi Raahein continued!

Guys, the response to my previous post has been overwhelming! THANK U! I could not touch upon the most amazing aspects of the school in my last post. So here it is.

Nayi Raahein has been doing phenomenon work and we have been experimenting a lot at the school. Thats perhaps the best part about having a small system in one's own home town! Its easy to implement your ideas, and you get faster results, at least that's what happened here!

Now, we have been lucky in the initial phase as we did not have any funding constraints. But donations are like monsoons,they dwindle with recession, wedding seasons and what not! We wanted to inculcate a feeling that each one who is able has a duty towards those who are not.

We started holding seminars in other schools telling the kids about this venture. We even brought the monitors of every class to Nayi Raahein to interact with the children. Then we insisted the Students, who belonged to well off families, to bring their previous day's newspaper from home and submit it to their class teachers.

The students were so involved that within the next one month, we had sold a lot of scrap. This was so much better than donations for the students now valued their state of being more, they knew that there were others far less blessed. But then over the weeks, the collection kept on decreasing. We had to device some way to keep students motivated, and we wanted to involve the parents and teachers as well! This is what we came up with:

A Weekly Newsletter! This two page newsletter contained the class photograph of most consistently involved class and original articles/paintings/drawings of the children from that class along with some tips for the parents like how to proactively know if your kids is into bad company, best practices n all that.
It also acted as a free publicity engine for the school.

The results were better than expected. Not only did students bring newspapers regularly, the school invested the best teachers in editing the articles. We eventually decided to run such campaigns in all schools of Hisar to reach out some 15000 school kids. The campaign is still on the run. I hope the ideas shared will help budding ventures in fund raising.

Thanks for all the encouragement! Have a great time! Bbye!!

Nayi Raahein

No m not posting any shayari stuff here. Neither m i in a preachy mood today!
Nayi Raahein is the name of a school which provides education to the underprivileged children in my hometown. This post is a simple straight depiction of the awesome stuff that led to Nayi Raahein. For those of you who already know how much i am fond of it, inconvenience is NOT regretted! :P

The school was established to benefit genuinely deserving cases and recruit extremely motivated and dedicated teachers who could empathize rather than discriminate.
Luckily, Bhargav Uncle, a well renowned visionary and philanthropist among the education community of the city,has been around forever! Thanks to him, Nayi Raahein is infra-structurally sound. So the challenge was to get things going.

For every application that came in, we visited the homes of applicants, to verify the genuineness of information provided on the forms, mainly their affordability. The most common reason due to which the families could not afford their child's education was alcohol addiction.

After shortlisting 50 children, we had to recruit teachers. The first gem that we found was the remarkable Mrs. Bhateri Devi. She comes from a lower middle class background and has faced ample hardships herself in her pursuit of graduation. The idea of teaching children of Nayi Raahein enthralled her and, though she is not very well equipped with communication skills and a vast experience, we hired her on the basis of her zeal. It was a unanimous decision to appoint Umesh's Mom as the principal. Right, i have not introduced Umesh yet.. Umesh is an engineering grad of GJU, the most popular university in Hisar. He hates the corporate, and is by far one of the most courageous people i have met. He is gifted with some entrepreneurial genius. Lemme finish with the Nayi Raahein story n ill tell you more about Umesh's awesomeness!

The school is not affiliated to any centralized body, so we freely finalized on the course material, engaged publishers of Bhargav School, outsourced the development of website, (check it out- http://nayiraahein.com), decided on the uniform, got blackboards and benches as donations etc! Umesh did most of the running around, and i just kept bossing him around :P

One fine day, in a kitty party, someone from our circle talked about Nayi Raahein. The Aunty jis took a positive interest and some thought it would be a good idea to treat the kids at Nayi Raahein on their children's birthdays. Eventually, an unanticipated LOT of donations started coming in.

Finally, 50 kids, dressed in their brand new uniforms were dropped by their working mothers to school, most them reluctant, some of them ready to burst into tears almost any moment! Bhateria Devi, the Jhansi ki Rani Part 2, lined them up for the morning assembly, sang prayers with them and for them, made them clap, bend, turn around, laugh! A new institution had been born!

I felt exactly like those reluctant children, i didn't wana go back to the corporate...
Wait up for the next post. Thanks for reading. Bye for now!