Revival through Priya's post

I have always thought there's nothing worse than a blog that comes with a fury and then you don't even hear the whimper. Our blog behaved a bit like that, what with college theses, interminable travels and other pre-occupations. Meanwhile I saw Priya Agarwal's blog while she was an Indicorps fellow based in Shivpuri, MP and it inspired me to revive this one. Priya summarizes her time in Pisangan Block of Doosra Dashak as below.

During the last week of January, I visited Pisangan, Rajasthan as part of my personal workshop. Indicorps asks us to select another NGO-whose focus is related to our respective projects-to visit and to learn their best practices and techniques. So for four days at the end of January, I rode on the back of a motorcycle through the hills of Rajasthan, visiting remote villages and learning about Doosra Dashak’s approach to providing accessible education. Doosra Dashak, literally meaning “second generation,” was founded in 2001 to put children, aged 11-20, who never begun formal education back or dropped out back into the school system. Their approach is, in one word, ingenious. The first step of Doosra Dashak’s engagement in a village is social mapping, a process that engages interested and various people of the community to map out the demographics of the village. I saw the final meeting of an assortment of kisans (farmers), housewives, and high school students, come together to examine the final version of the census they had created. Later that same day, they threw a huge party for the villagers of Rathor, showing, in a well-crafted PowerPoint presentation, the status of education in their village. It was dire. According to the statistics presented, the situation called for immediate attention, which was Doosra Dashak’s second step.When volunteers are social mapping, they come into contact with the various influential people of the village including midwives, Ananwadi (government nursery) workers, teachers, and of course panchayat officials. They use these contacts to set up a woman’s group, a mehla samooh. In turn, the mehla samooh draws local support and sponsorship to send children to a four-month residential camp intended to mainstream them into formal education. I was fortunate enough to visit the campsite twice during my stay at Pisangan. The boys I met, taught to shake hands instead of bowing for the traditional pranam (a sign of respect for elders), wowed me with their eagerness to learn and their solemn commitments to continue the ‘good habits’ they had learned. After the camp, active alumni of these camps then create a Yuva Manch, a youth group, to address social problems and carryout samaj seva in their village. Especially active members of this group are sent to the Youth Sangatan, a youth forum that meets once every two months.Visiting Doosra Dashak was incredible. Not only was it an inspirational lift, the sheer physical beauty of Rajasthan was heart-stopping. See a panorama of craggy hilltops and desert land, the sky, a deeper inky black than you thought imaginable, pierced with a shrapnel of stars, the rising and falling of rocky and crumbling fort walls, a castle on a mountaintop where brides and grooms continue to pay homage on their wedding day, legends and lore you thought mythical, like the city of Bithor in The Far Pavilions, being places on a map. Being there was almost like living in a fairytale. With the cold winter air whistling through my dupatta, I felt as though I was flying through Rajasthan. In four days, I visited more than ten villages. We sailed through villages situated 50 km apart in the day and in the dry heat, visions of women draped in brightly colored saris and lenghas alternated with desert scenes.I met child brides and even more childish brothers-in-law. Parts of Rajasthan that seemingly had not been touched by modernity, a romantic notion I know, and one that could be true if you looked past the overwhelming number of satellite dishes in multistoried homes. India is at once a contradiction and a wonder. In villages where no one has a bathroom, everyone may have a television. Think again about your definition of a village home. A hut? Try a multistoried complex, as dazzling and intricate as anything you could see in Architectural Digest. At once beautiful yet troubling are India’s steps toward the future. The caste system still holds supreme; in every home I sat and drank chai,in someone would ask me what my caste was and nod accordingly. The gunghut, a married woman shielding her face with the palloo of her sari to denote respect for the males in her vicinity, became my deepest grievance against the injustice women face in this country. Yet, Indian hospitality continues to be unparalleled. After visiting a mostly Muslim populated village for an hour with Anita, a DD worker, she invited me to her home and I stayed the night, sleeping beside her and her four-year old son. We woke up at dawn when Auntie, her mother, passed us mugs of cardamom and ginger infused chai and told us to go to the rooftop and watch the sun rise over the castles in the distance. India is beautiful and cruel in too many ways.