By Azeez Gupta
A quick introduction – I have recently joined the Pratham
Institute as part of a pursuit for happiness and meaning. The past 2 years
spent working at a renowned consultancy saw me engage in stimulating work with
fantastic minds – yet I could never escape the nagging feeling that I was
coasting. I missed the violent single-minded passion I experienced during my
most fulfilling college years, and hope that working for a cause again will
help me re-discover those emotions.
Seeing as I came to Pratham as a relatively green, mostly city
boy, who had grown up seeing the poor, but had never really interacted deeply with
underprivileged people, I was promptly packed off to see all our programs and
centers on the ground. The resulting 2 week trip through the hinterlands of
Maharashtra was truly eye-opening. I met dozens of our students, learnt about
their lives and heard their stories. In the process, I went from being an
armchair intellectual to… well, definitely not an expert, but someone who’s starting
to get a pulse of India today. The things we all pontificate about, but really
know very little about. In this post, I will try to put down some of my observations, as I remember them. These are random and unstructured reflections, often mundane, and accompanied by my unsolicited comments – but may be interesting to my peers, as cossetted as I was.
- I asked students what they liked best about their time at Pratham training centers. The quickest and most enthusiastic response – “Shaving”! Shaving?! Here we are, claiming to turn your lives around, give you opportunity and all that jazz, and what you like most is shaving?! It was very endearing – and jokes apart, the shaving was part of a broader theme of following rules and regulations and living a structured life. Concepts that we elites resist resolutely, but are both important for and attractive to these young people who’ve lived their lives in relative chaos.
- The level of attention in classes and devotion to learning was extraordinary – it put me to shame, looking back at how many of my batch-mates and I went through our IIT education.
- I heard the personal stories of many students – most were from villages and had absolutely no jobs available at their homes. They spent their times roaming around the fields aimlessly, with nothing to do, and occasionally working on the farms. It bought the scarcity of opportunities home to me very starkly, especially in contrast to the vast expanse of options I have been blessed with all my life.
- The more things are different though, the more they remain the same When I asked what kids use the computer center for, after their daily studies are over, there was a lot of sniggering followed by the euphemism ‘watch videos of movie stars on the internet’. Young men are the same everywhere!
