A perfectly good summer
"When you are with the right people, the time is always right and the day always beautiful."
Even with the unbearable scorching heat, summer of 2016 gave me some of the most beautiful days spent with just the right people.
I started my vacations with earning myself a place in Ashoka University's Young Scholar Programme. For once, it felt good to study, to learn and to explore. For once it felt great to indulge in sports and outdoor activities. For once I was at peace when I was surrounded by more than a hundred people everyday. And it felt like home, away from home.
( More about it on http://surabhisanghi.blogspot.in/2016/05/ashoka-university-week-that-was.html )
But neither did my summer end there nor the journey of my summer. I had earlier enrolled for another programme called Young Leaders for Active Citizenship. That began almost two weeks later. We were required to fill out the our preferences for NGO's we would like to intern with. I chose Indus Action.
Three of us from YLAC - me, Aditya and Jayansh used to go everyday in the early hours of the vacations, all the way to Badarpur Border metro station and walk another fifteen minutes and hope to get an auto which would take us to Tagore Shiksha Niketan in Mithapur village at the lowest rates.
Indus Action had organised summer camps for children for the age group of 3-6 years in three different locations. One of them being in Badarpur. Our job was to observe and understand the teachers and students and the parents who came to drop or pick their children. We were required to facilitate teachers with the activities that had been planned out by the Indus Action team.
Another initiate by the Indus Action team was that they organised daily sessions for mothers and grandmothers where for the fist forty five minutes they parent facilitators helped the parents understand what activities their children did at schools and how they can do their bit in helping the child to learn at homes.
Honestly, for me I went to the school with the thought that I have to write something in my resume. But like everything that was happening with me over the summer, it turned out to be bigger than what my dimwitted horizons could have ever foreseen.
I met a girl, small, yet had the power to challenge the way I think, I feel about people. Even though she was nine years old but due to her mild mental retardation she was admitted with the three year old. She had never been to school before and this was her first experience of receiving some sort of education. But unfortunately for her, it came with a heavy price. The price was the glares and the disgusted looks she got everyday from the other parents and teachers. The price was the fact she was looked down upon and people dare not come close to her lest sometimes touch her. The price was the stigma that society has already poisoned her with, the stigma that she will have to live with life long.
I decided all the time I was at that school, I would 'adopt' her as my own. I took it upon myself that her last two weeks at school would not be wasted in another round of suffering. I would bring her small gifts like clay and crayons and play with her. When I would give her anything or help her, her eyes would lit up. They would twinkle like the stars in a clear night sky. After spending two days with her, she started coming to me automatically and pull me to be with her in the class room. She would greet me with a hug and when she was leaving she would give me a hug. In between I would be smothered with kisses and more hugs. I became her dancing partner and lunch break buddy. She started giving me her paintings which were in fact just a colourful mess.
And all of that broke me. Because I couldn't do anything beyond that. She will have to go back to the realms of society where no one will accept her or give her any sort of love or affection to her. She will be swallowed by the evils of the society and in my mind too she will become a victim of the ravages of time. She will soon become a memory. Memories fade away and sooner or later she will too. Just like the mounds in a desert keep changing, keep shifting, so do memories of the unconscious.
On 30th June I realised, my beautiful days of Summer have finally come to an end. Of course I am just another victim of the 'back to school blues' but this time it hit me hard. It hit me hard because for the first time I lived my summer, I lived my life. I was not a zombie for the summer lying here and there being a couch potato. I did something. I did something worthwhile. I touched upon a life. Moreover several lives touched upon me. I never thought human beings can ever be 'good'. But they were. And just like that I miss these vacations and yearn for them to return.
... and that is how a perfectly good summer just seems to pass by in a second.
Even with the unbearable scorching heat, summer of 2016 gave me some of the most beautiful days spent with just the right people.
I started my vacations with earning myself a place in Ashoka University's Young Scholar Programme. For once, it felt good to study, to learn and to explore. For once it felt great to indulge in sports and outdoor activities. For once I was at peace when I was surrounded by more than a hundred people everyday. And it felt like home, away from home.
( More about it on http://surabhisanghi.blogspot.in/2016/05/ashoka-university-week-that-was.html )
But neither did my summer end there nor the journey of my summer. I had earlier enrolled for another programme called Young Leaders for Active Citizenship. That began almost two weeks later. We were required to fill out the our preferences for NGO's we would like to intern with. I chose Indus Action.
Three of us from YLAC - me, Aditya and Jayansh used to go everyday in the early hours of the vacations, all the way to Badarpur Border metro station and walk another fifteen minutes and hope to get an auto which would take us to Tagore Shiksha Niketan in Mithapur village at the lowest rates.
Indus Action had organised summer camps for children for the age group of 3-6 years in three different locations. One of them being in Badarpur. Our job was to observe and understand the teachers and students and the parents who came to drop or pick their children. We were required to facilitate teachers with the activities that had been planned out by the Indus Action team.
Another initiate by the Indus Action team was that they organised daily sessions for mothers and grandmothers where for the fist forty five minutes they parent facilitators helped the parents understand what activities their children did at schools and how they can do their bit in helping the child to learn at homes.
Honestly, for me I went to the school with the thought that I have to write something in my resume. But like everything that was happening with me over the summer, it turned out to be bigger than what my dimwitted horizons could have ever foreseen.
I met a girl, small, yet had the power to challenge the way I think, I feel about people. Even though she was nine years old but due to her mild mental retardation she was admitted with the three year old. She had never been to school before and this was her first experience of receiving some sort of education. But unfortunately for her, it came with a heavy price. The price was the glares and the disgusted looks she got everyday from the other parents and teachers. The price was the fact she was looked down upon and people dare not come close to her lest sometimes touch her. The price was the stigma that society has already poisoned her with, the stigma that she will have to live with life long.
I decided all the time I was at that school, I would 'adopt' her as my own. I took it upon myself that her last two weeks at school would not be wasted in another round of suffering. I would bring her small gifts like clay and crayons and play with her. When I would give her anything or help her, her eyes would lit up. They would twinkle like the stars in a clear night sky. After spending two days with her, she started coming to me automatically and pull me to be with her in the class room. She would greet me with a hug and when she was leaving she would give me a hug. In between I would be smothered with kisses and more hugs. I became her dancing partner and lunch break buddy. She started giving me her paintings which were in fact just a colourful mess.
And all of that broke me. Because I couldn't do anything beyond that. She will have to go back to the realms of society where no one will accept her or give her any sort of love or affection to her. She will be swallowed by the evils of the society and in my mind too she will become a victim of the ravages of time. She will soon become a memory. Memories fade away and sooner or later she will too. Just like the mounds in a desert keep changing, keep shifting, so do memories of the unconscious.
On 30th June I realised, my beautiful days of Summer have finally come to an end. Of course I am just another victim of the 'back to school blues' but this time it hit me hard. It hit me hard because for the first time I lived my summer, I lived my life. I was not a zombie for the summer lying here and there being a couch potato. I did something. I did something worthwhile. I touched upon a life. Moreover several lives touched upon me. I never thought human beings can ever be 'good'. But they were. And just like that I miss these vacations and yearn for them to return.
... and that is how a perfectly good summer just seems to pass by in a second.
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