An Enriching Start

Introduction: As a team of two from our school, my partner Anamika and I set out for the Kathputali Colony – slums located near the Shadipur Depot – to find out social concerns and help bring out possible solutions.

The NGO I was working with had assigned me a group of three girls. They were about eighteen or seventeen, which meant not much older than me. I sat down in front of them, with my partner, and they gave me friendly smiles. After basic introductions, I asked them the questions that had been bugging me since I’d walked through their classrooms.

“Do you go to school?” I asked. The girls exchanged nervous glances. One of them, Puja laughed uneasily.

“We did!” She said. “We studied till Class 8, I think.”

“What made you leave school?” I asked, not at all surprised.

“We wanted to study,” Sheetal, one the others, spoke up. “I mean, it was okay, but we have brothers in our families. They will study.”

“We have to cook, you know,” Preeti said. “And wash clothes. We have to do the household chores, the men and our brothers can go to school.”

“Even if we do go to school,” Puja put in. “We can’t, after a certain age. What would society think? What would the others feel? What will our neighbours say about us?”

“But if you do want to study,” I objected. “All this won’t matter. Don’t your parents want you to study?” I knew the answer to that one. In a group discussion we had had earlier, a few parents had voiced their concerns.

“We weren’t literate ourselves, we had to struggle so much,” A mother of five said. “This is why all of my children will go to school.”

 But when asked if they did, in fact, go to school, she hesitated briefly. “My sons go to school,” She said. “My oldest daughter…not so much… Our society doesn’t let girls go to school. What would everyone say? Young girl, going out of the house for hours – it’s not something everybody looks upon with approval.”

“But you want them to go to school,” I insisted.

“Yes, but it’s been years since they left!” Some other woman joined in. “Now they wouldn’t want to.”

Yes, they had adjusted well to this oppression. They had adjusted so well to this unfairness, in fact, that they had forgotten what they wanted themselves.

The younger girls and boys, all were eager to go to school. They would attend the Government school nearby, and then come over to the NGO, learning dancing, singing, playing instruments and sometimes even acrobats in its beautiful hallways. With a computer lab, a dancing hall and music room with instruments, along with a courtyard where they could very well indulge in sports, the NGO was giving the kids the platform they wanted to learn as well as express themselves. The reason of giving such importance to these activities was obvious – it was their heritage, their culture, these families were gypsies, their ancestors all puppeteers and cultural artists, and this took the front seat in this society.

But that did not mean they were absolutely oblivious to the importance of education and modernity. Almost all parents wanted their children to be educated, and do better jobs than being dhol-players in marriages and dancers in baraats. But what they clearly lacked, we inferred, was the awareness and the information about education, and this was what we decided to tackle.

“We’ll hold discussions,” I told Neha, our guide from the NGO. “We’ll talk to parents, to girls. We will tell them why they should study, what they will achieve when they do so. If they want some catching up classes before taking up school again, we will give them that. I will help them take up story writing as a hobby, I will revisit the alphabets, numbers and languages again with them. The target would be kids our age – too young to be in college, too old to sit with the nine- and ten-year-olds to study. We’ll change their perspective, we’ll change this society.”

Yes, we will. The decision was firm, and I knew it would be very difficult, laborious and hard to gather children and teenagers and actually try to inculcate education in their everyday life.

But I am determined to fight for the cause.