In addition to the Interact Club, it was our first interaction with the senior school boys in this session and the batch of XI grade youngsters responded enthusiastically to the issue.

“It is very heart breaking to know that while we in the urban areas are playing computer games and eating out all the time, there are children dying in the slums because they have none of the facilities we get so easily.” said Rohan Saxena

“We should also spread awareness about family planning and birth control so that they have small families and the finances are less divided and maximum attention be paid to each child”. – S. Rajagopala Rao XI C

“I would personally like to go to a jhuggi nearby and check how many children they have, what are the hygiene conditions, and analyze the conditions there. I am dividing my action plan into two parts

-         Sidharth Mahesh

“We could also do a kind of picnic in the slum where we go and interact with the children, play with them; share our stories and our food. And from here we can build on a project on child mortality with them”. – Raunaq Chawari

“Students could be motivated to participate because they need to involve themselves in social work to add to their profiles for CCE, GRE, etc.” – Nikhit Mago

Our small session with the Interact Club boys to introduce them to the topic also brought in some great suggestions; Vatsal Sharma of class IX exclaimed, “Its outrageous!! Instead of spending Rs. 36,000 crores on the CWG, the government should have invested in public health.”

“The basic need for all Indians is to create awareness amongst all of us and ensure the people take proper measures to reduce poverty and child mortality. Human life is precious and we must learn to respect and protect it” wrote  Rishabh Shukla.

We hope to be able to carry forward this initiative and convert their empathy into solid action. The students recognized areas like Ashoka Place, slums outside their own school and Harijan Basti near The Hyatt as possible target groups to work with.

The documentary films on the issue of child mortality shook the students out of their complacency. Every 15 seconds a child dies in India, averaging a shocking 2 million children every year!  What made a deeper impact was that most die of easily preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia.

The students shared some very though provoking suggestions.

-         “We should go to these slum areas and collect information on what they eat, how they live and what are the problems they are facing. Then we should educate them and help them to get more information about these problems.” – Mayank

-         “We could supply them with some basic first aid like antiseptics, ORS, bandages, etc and we should make them aware of the latest government schemes like free treatment in government hospitals, free vaccines, etc”. – Vivek Singh

-         “We should use the RTI to ask the government what it is doing about the condition of these people and take actions according to that we should take action.” – Lalit Kumar

-         “We should have medical camps where we educate people from the slums about easy solutions to diseases like diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, dengue, etc”. – Poonam

-         “We could distribute healthy food to the slum children once a week. We could also make handicrafts and sell them to collect money for the poor.” – Simran

-         “We should form groups and take up this campaign, going to villages and slums and talking to the families who have suffered such problems. We should organize a meal plan for the poor families and contribute the best we can.” – Rakshita

Suggestions for slums in which the students could work included Bangali Colony, Kidwai Nagar, and Arjun Das jhuggi, Laxmi Bai Nagar.

The Foundation intends to take forward today’s interaction into a concrete community project which the students and staff together take ownership of, and make a lasting impact on the community they engage with. In the spirit of true citizenship!

This year we chose issues of Hunger, Hygiene and Infant Mortality, a part of Save the Children’s EVERY ONE campaign, so that in the coming months, the play can be used as an advocacy tool in different slums, community centres and schools.

SAPNE AAM AADMI KE is a sharp comment on the hypocrisy within our society, on issues of survival that the common man seems entrapped within, and the gender inequity that is still widely prevalent today. It seeks to inspire him soar beyond his daily bindings, release his fears and anxieties and direct his passion towards creating a New World, where Love and Respect is a given for every living being.

Having worked on this theme during the summer break, we intend to take forward these same messages to schools in Delhi during the new academic term.

Today, we engaged with the students of Class XI C and D from Kendriya Vidyalaya, Vigyan Vihar and left them with some important information on child mortality,  focusing on the proximity of such cases to their relatively sheltered lives.

Ms. Meenu Wadhwa, their co-curricular teacher,  believes that it is important to shift the students’ focus from “low waists and spikes” to  socially relevant issues that they can engage with. After screening short documentaries on the topic, the interaction that followed showed this shift of focus. The students came up with some great suggestions to tackle the issue of child mortality.

-         “We should make people aware of the common diseases and should tell them about the simple cures to them. We should put up boxes in shopping malls so that these rich people can donate some money and help the poor people.” – Ambuj Tripathi

-         “We should go to every house in the slums and tell them that a) they should keep their house clean, b) if their children fall sick they should immediately take them to the nearest government hospital,  c) if there are mosquitoes, etc in there area they should contact the MCD to get rid of them.” – Sidharth Sharma

-        ” If we contribute the amount of money we spend on unnecessary stuff  towards this cause, it’ll help someone to buy clothes, proper food, proper medical treatment and educate them.” – Neha

-         “If there’s a festival, instead of wasting money on gifts and dresses for ourselves, we should think about people in the slums and help them with things they really need.” – Sukhmeet Jaswal

-         “Doctors should treat poor people free of cost.” – Vaibhav

-       “We should cut down on our daily junk food and give that money to help feed poor children.” -Shashank

-         “Once a week, we should take hygienically cooked food and distribute it to deprived children.” – Monica

Outcomes:

The Foundation intends to take forward this interaction into a year long community project in which the students of KV Vigyan Vihar adopt a nearby slum and conduct a survey about the state of health and hygiene amongst the slum dwellers.

They  start an advocacy campaign focusing on the health of the children and women in the slum, and devise ways to improve their present conditions.

Some of the suggestions that came from the children this morning included contributing their pocket money towards buying hygienic food for the slum children, donating some of the money they spend on junk food, crackers etc. so that each family could be given packets of ORS to keep at home, in case of an emergency.

We are keen for the students to take ownership of the campaign they will be spearheading in the slum nearby. Their involvement in the community can only reap rich dividends for them, as they begin to realize that the rights and responsibilities of a citizen go hand in hand.

Today was an important beginning.

The Being Human workshops focus on the ‘Self’ , pushing our youth to discover and express self  determining issues like the qualities and core values that define human beings. By putting the students through various situations of conflict, the workshops help understand responses to such conflict and find solutions to greed and hatred which is widespread in society today.

Aman Kothari's description of the mediatation session

The first batch of the workshops in July stretched over 3 days of intense work through tools like meditation and various creative expression exercises. The students, who began with a very disciplined first day gradually loosened up and explored absolutely new facets to themselves as well as others around them.

Mohit Mendiratta's pictorial representation of his feelings during the workshop

The Mirror exercise happened to be a favourite for most of the participants. As Ashish Kothari puts it” Following the other person’s movements was initially tricky, but as the eye contact grew stronger, it started becoming more natural.”It showed Salman Qureshi the importance of coordination and respecting the other person’ s pace.About meditation Ashish wrote ” It was a soothing experience. It was as if colours moving chaotically suddenly  came to a more uniform and slow motion.”It helped another student settle his volatile mind and helped him focus more.

Here are some pictures from the workshops.

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Amidst the color and glitter of the 5th Jaipur Literature Festival this year, 60 young people from different backgrounds came together for 6 days, to learn and sensitize one another, as they explored different facets of what being Human truly meant.

A clear economic and social divide ran through the group – half representing the elite of Jaipur, as the students came from prestigious high schools like the Maharani Gayathri Devi Girls’ School, Maharaja Sawai Man Singh Vidyalaya and Step By Step High School.

Students from different schools and institutions together

The other 30 participants were from two NGOs – Digantar, working on the outskirts of Jaipur with Muslim girls who are first generation learners, and Doosra Dashak, an organization that focuses on the education and development of young people in the age group of 11-20 years, as a lever for larger social and economic development.

The mix of privileged children with the less fortunate was a deliberate choice for the workshop, to stress on importance of Social Equity, even as we all explored the core values of Human Dignity, Love and Respect.

The workshop began a day prior to the festival, on 20^th January, to provide an uncluttered space for the participants to drop their inhibitions and embark on their discovery of each other and themselves.

It kicked off as a morning of fun with theatre games and icebreakers opening up the group, to freely share their thoughts and compile a list of what they felt, the core values of BEING HUMAN entailed. Compassion, openness and flexibility, self belief, fearlessness and respect for every living being, headed the list.

Across the festival grounds placards on the theme of BEING HUMAN had been placed strategically, to provoke the visitors into engaging with the issue.

Using waste material like discarded cardboard boxes, old newspapers and greeting cards, the children designed 6 Response boxes, to collect written feedback from the visitors. It was an exciting afternoon on the first day, as the children broke up into random groups and painted, pasted and created magical boxes for the respondents.

The next morning as they excitedly placed the boxes across the festival grounds, the students chatted with the visitors, coming back with different responses on humanism. Some went across to the Google Van parked in the grounds and worked in mixed groups, so that the rural students could learn about the ease of navigating through the Internet, and have individual email ids created for them.

The next five days were a mix of activities ranging from intense group work using the medium of theatre, improvisations and role plays on different situations in the human experience, to individual meditations prompting self reflection, to interacting with a diverse range of resource people who interacted with the participants through the six days.

Watching the Muslim girls from Digantar fiercely narrate their on going struggle with their families and community, as they sought permission to continue with their studies beyond Class 8, was an eye opener for many present.  Krishna Singh ,a class XI student from Maharani Gayathri Devi Girls’ School was very touched by their story,”I felt ashamed when I saw their zeal to study because people like us who get all these facilities easily don’t appreciate it.”  Most of the privileged students had assumed that these kinds of struggles have been a part of pre-independent India, and that today, there was more equality between the sexes. Receiving the truth of these young girls, connecting with their pain and anger, sensitized them to the plight of many other young girls in rural India, who could be spearheading similar struggles.

A range of sessions organized through the 6 days exposed the children to different facets of life. A morning was well spent with painter Bulbul Sharma, as she took them through a Nature Art workshop, in which the children mingled freely, creating a tapestry of vibrant pictures on a single canvas, with an amazing riot of color!

At the Theatre workshop that afternoon they worked with music and movement, learning songs from other groups, understanding the universality of this language. This experience expanded into sheer delight with the performance of SAMPAD – a South Asian group based in the UK, who were n Jaipur on an experimental project, with musicians and dancers from diverse disciplines. It was a treat to watch the dancers and musicians respond to each other’s nuances and rhythms, creating a harmony that flowed seamlessly through the artistes.

We were ready to work on deeper core issues – of conflict, of resolution, of building consensus.

Dilip Simeon, a firm believer in the Gandhian principle of non violence, shared his journey as young political activist, who committed to the Naxal cause in the early 70’s because he believed in their ideology of fighting for the rights of the landless labour. Chaitanya Tambi from Step by Step High school said”I thought the naxals were bad people. After the interaction with Mr. Simeon I realized their fight is for a cause! That has changed my approach towards a lot of things.”

And his subsequent disenchantment as he questioned the bloodshed and violence as a form of resolution, and whether instead, it did not perpetuate another cycle of mindless violence.

In the context of today’s fragmented world these are not easy questions, and the attempt was to open up the complexities of the issues involved, so that each participant engaged with the issue from the context of the greater good.

The debate was further enhanced through the presentation given by Ornit Shani and Frederik Gauteng from Jerusalem, on the Palestine Israel conflict. Through an effective role play in which the students participated, they demonstrated the plight of the ordinary citizens, locked in a political conflict they seemed to be hapless victims of.

Was there a humane way to resolve these conflicts? How could one move into a space of open dialogue, even before one can even think of any form of Consensus?

No easy answers can be forthcoming.

Students meditating

With these questions uppermost in our minds, we relaxed into a deeper meditative space the next morning, where we tried to assimilate the experiences of the past 5 days into our core with love and respect, accepting our selves completely, and then reaching out to our neighbors’ with trust and belief. A couple of hours of meditation and deep reflection flowed into a theatre exercise of reaching out to a partner with love and trust, of easing the pain of another by lovingly opening out the knots and blocks in their physical being. Also learning to receive love and respect with the same ease, as one is comfortable with giving. “If there’s anything better than being loved,it is loving!”, said Krishna

Refreshed after such a rejuvenating morning, they students enjoyed a session on Animal Welfare with Dr. Sandeep Pandey who runs an NGO in Jaipur called “Help in Suffering”. Compassion was to extend not only to another human being but to every living creature on this planet! The students exchanged ideas as to how they could help create a better environment for animals in Jaipur, and promised to remain connected with Dr. Pandey well after the workshop.

It was now time to wind down….the last morning was one of feedback, of poetry, singing, games…and sharing….

The children had broken out of their comfort spaces of only mixing with those from a similar background. Instead they had reached out across social and economic divides to connect with a completely different reality, and relate it to their own.”I got to make friends with children from NGO’s ,from other schools as well as the theatre artists from England. Thanks to the workshop,we became comfortable with each other” said Madhu Singh from Maharani Gayatri Devi girls’ school. The voice of the girls from Digantar and their passion for education, resonated deep with all of them, and if any community action is to be taken in future, the students from the workshop would be articulate supporters of their fight.

Excerpts from their writings:

Maseena Khan from Digantar in her poem “Bhedbhav” writes -

“Hamara samaj karta ladka ladki mein bhedbhav kyun?

Ladke ko B.A karatey, ladki ko panchvi kyun??”

(Translation: why does our society discriminate between a girl and a boy? Why is the boy allowed to study for a college degree, while a girl is only educated upto Class 5?)

Naziya, a class 10 student of Digantar, in her poem titled “Aye Manav tu itna Swarthi na ban” says -

“Ek pankhudi lekar uski khushboo bhari kashish ko to dekh,

Jab ped katey to uske dard ko mehsoos karke to dekh!

Aye manav tu itna swarthy na ban,

Tu ek baar prakriti ka dost ban kar to dekh!”

(Translation: As one inhales the fragrance of a petal, is one also aware of the pain of a tree as it is being cut? O Man, don’t be so caught up in your own selfishness, try befriending Nature for a change!)

Anil Kumar Dulara from Bassi learnt that”Koi bada ya chhota nahi hota, humko kabhi ghamand nahi karna chahiye!  Maine yahaan bhedbhav mitana seekha!”

(Translation: No one is superior or inferior to anyone. We should never become arrogant. Here I have learnt how to fight any form of discrimination.)

Rekha from Doosra Darshak says “We were all compete strangers when we came here! But over the past few days we’ve all become friends and I don’t feel strange anymore.”

“What are the qualities of a good human being?

Honesty…Respect…

Integrity…Discipline…

Love…Compassion…

Is this enough???

NO I don’t think so!” writes Bhawna from Maharani Gayatri Devi girls’ school.

“What is being human?

Is it being over confident?

Or doing things you resent?

No it is not!” say the girls from MGD girls’ school.

Sanyukta from Step by Step high school sums up with:

“It is better to die,

Than to see people cry!

If everything goes on as it is, I will surely run!

Because I desperately want to be Human!”