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!