What You Hear Is What You Read
I recently came across an organization called PlanetRead that completely captured my heart, and I am so excited about the work they are doing to improve literacy in India. There are 900 million illiterate people in the world, and 1/3 of those people, 300 million, live in India. According to UNICEF, 66% of India’s population is illiterate. I was acutely aware of India’s literacy problem and its implications for the socioeconomic development of the country, however I was still surprised to hear the explanation of Dr. Larry Brilliant, Executive Director for Google.org, in reference to the undeniable urgency of a literate nation. He explained that if you do a multiple logistic regression analysis and you put all of the variables in trying to explain what is the single most important factor in determining whether a child will live or die past the age of 5, it isn’t water or vaccinations, but the literacy of that child’s mother.
› Continue reading
India is a Melody
You just can’t escape it. It’s in the streets, in the stores, in the taxis, in the blood of the people that call India their home. Music pervades every inch of this city, from the pavement to the palaces, and for many, it’s the lifeblood that propels them towards another day.
I came here to explore the impact of Bollywood, the billion-dollar industry and musical export heard the world over. Five years ago, Bombay possessed only a handful of nightclubs, each pulsating with Hindi film songs and Bollywood dance moves, the Bombay Romeos purring lyrics from their favorite hits. I was surprised however to find a contemporary Bombay quite different from the one I had known. Globalization brought to Bombay German cars and Japanese electronics, Italian food and New York styles. It also brought a completely revolutionized music scene that represents a new generation of Indians. In the Bombay of today, there are dozens of nightclubs spread all throughout the city and a new wave of genres that cater to a new class of Indians. With the explosion of new media and nouveau rich Indians traveling the globe came new styles of music reserved exclusively for an upper class society that separates them from the common folk. I’m discovering that amongst other things, music is a major representation of the vast socioeconomic class divide that pervades the city.
› Continue reading
The Festival of Lights
Christmas came early this year as the lights of the holiday merged with the fireworks of the Fourth of July during my first Diwali in India. I celebrated Diwali in Delhi, where I visited extended family and friends that I haven’t seen in years. Diwali is known as the “festival of lights,” or spiritually, the “awareness of inner light.” Hindus believe that there is something beyond the physical state of being which is eternal and infinite, called the Atman. › Continue reading
Food Before The Law
While life is not picture perfect in the USA, one thing America can justly pride itself on is the idea of the “American Dream.” No matter your initial socio-economic status, hard work and ambition can provide you a ticket to a better life. I have a friend from high school that grew up in a drug-infested, poverty stricken neighborhood in Chicago. He worked hard and obtained a scholarship first to Phillips Academy Andover and then to Harvard. He is now a star trader at Goldman Sachs and his prospects are unlimited. In India, such a rise to the top from an underprivileged background is virtually impossible. The country revolves around an elite 1% of the population that owns the other 99%, with family businesses that extend for generations controlling the lot of it. The poorest are so poor that there is little hope to rise unless some sort of viable standard of living is obtained. India is a nation of about 1.15 billion people, and the amount of untapped potential that lay in the slums and in the countryside is staggering. Without the basic necessities of life, how can these children even begin to dream? What would they even dream of?
› Continue reading
Slumdog
It was the Oscar winning movie that couldn’t help but make the world fall in love. Given the success of Slumdog Millionaire, Dharavi was naturally my first foray into the vast slum life of this grand city. Even though I had already been working with slum kids at the Akanksha Centers, I thought it was important to explore their lives in the slum itself, to see firsthand where they came from and to understand their worlds. The Dharavi slum remains the largest slum in Asia, and with over 1 million people clustered in 1 square mile, it is the only slum that you can see from the moon. There are numerous tourist agencies that operate there and offer guided walks through the area. The tour guides explain that their mission is to show visitors that the slum is not filled with a lazy and apathetic people, but rather a hard-working community that collaborates to live another day. There are over 10,000 different industries in the slum, from the traditional pottery and textile industries to an increasingly large recycling industry that processes recyclable waste from other parts of Mumbai. Dharavi exports goods around the world, with the total turnover estimated to be around 650 million US Dollars per year. The men in the slums work 10 hour days, melting aluminum and plastic, without even masks to protect against the fumes. The women wash empty kerosene cans in boiling hot water from dawn until dusk, without gloves to shield them from burn. And they do this for a mere 150 to 200 rupees a day. To give you a first-hand sense of the disparity in Bombay, I was at a friend’s birthday party on Marine Drive where her Indian boyfriend bought the table a 21,000 rupee bottle of champagne. The bill for 6, which he covered, was over 100,000 rupees. In 2 hours. Sans food. Most people wouldn’t see that amount in their lives.
› Continue reading
2008 Grantees
