I took 8 years to marry my passion to my profession
Stories of Role Models
I grew up thinking I would be a disaster if I was not an engineer. Later, I realised, I am a disaster in engineering; so I engineered my own rescue.
I grew up in a lower middle class family and Dad was a small entrepreneur. My parents had limited exposure. To them, you had made it, if you were a doctor or an engineer.
So, it was engineering for me.
I finished my engineering and was unsure of what to do next.
I started doing some MBA preparation after that. A friend was preparing for TCS entrance and needed help with logical reasoning questions. I offered to help.
A day before the TCS process, my dad pushed me to also apply for it. I did and I got through.
Everybody said, a bird in hand is always better than two anywhere else, so I ended up joining TCS in Mumbai.
In the induction training, I hit it off with Natarajan, who was a pucca Dr Abdul Kalam fan. He had been active for social causes in college. We were posted to the same office and became roomies together.
Our apartment was next to a slum colony. One evening, we were walking back home when we saw 2 kids playing with marbles, near a gutter. Thick black water flowed slowly in the gutter.
I saw that whenever a marble fell in, one of the boys would jump in without a thought, retrieve it, and they would continue playing as if nothing had happened.
I was shocked. Maybe so because my family has been a stickler for cleanliness.
I asked Natarajan if we could do something about it. He agreed. Eswar, another colleague, was in the room too. He nodded yes too.
It would change our lives.
We went across and made friends with the boys. Natarajan spoke some Hindi, but I did not. Not yet.
Within the week, we were all playing together in the evening. They would laugh at my broken Hindi. I would scold them in English when needed. They would pick up my anguish from just the tone itself.
(Today the two boys work at the Mumbai airport)
Slowly, our tribe grew to 15 children in this pada. We would go to their homes every day. Talk to them, teach them English, computers, whatever we knew.
We started celebrating birthdays. Then we organised a Sports Day. They loved the exposure they got. We loved it as well.
Aarey milk colony was a tribal hamlet nearby. We started going there too. Some colleagues from the office also started to involve themselves.
Within a few months, we were running weekend study centres at both the locations.
Few colleagues from Pune heard about what we were doing. We visited them and shared our experience.
They wanted to do something about child beggars in Pune. They started similar classes and interactions with them. Soon their work spread to Manavya- a home for HIV positive kids and then to an orphanage - Apla Ghar.
We gave ourselves a name - Dream India - and put together a website.
As the word-of-mouth spread, someone from Chennai called, someone from Bangalore called. Back then, in 2007, the only notable NGO name people knew about was CRY. So this movement gave many people a platform to support communities living around them.
When someone was hesitant to make the first move, we would go in and bridge the initial reluctance. Then they took off by themselves. It was just a process, and it worked beautifully.
We soon started study centres in 4 cities. We grew. At peak, we were present in 6 cities!
All this based on weekend volunteering and no employees. We encouraged our new volunteer friends to keep it simple, just like we had done.
We said -
You don’t have to devote your whole life to social service. Just spend a couple hours on weekends.
Pick up a place next to where you live and first just go spend time with the kids
Contact with you and exposure to you will shape their worldview, even if you do nothing else.
You will build affection for them. The details are all easy after that.
As we grew, funds came in from wellwishers to support us financially.
One day, we found we had 3 Lakh in our account due to a media story and not much recall on where all it had come in from. We were joking about starting a study centre inside the central prison if we all got arrested!
A CA friend advised us against continuing like this. So we organised ourselves a bit more and registered ourselves as a non-profit.
I continued in TCS for 8 years. My day job took me to the US for a while. I got married. Had a kid of my own. I got posted to Chennai. Meanwhile, Dream India volunteers continued on.
I did not want to continue in a tech job. My heart was elsewhere.
I came across the Azim Premji Foundation in Bangalore. The Education and Leadership Management (ELM) team was looking for a Program Manager. I qualified for it because of the combination of my day job program management and weekend teaching experiences.
The salary on offer was less than my tech job, but it would let me match my profession and passion.
I discussed this with my wife and took a plunge into this role. We moved to Bangalore.
The next 3 years went by in a happy blur.
I travelled around the country, mostly to interior areas. I worked with teachers and government officials, responsible for our country’s education system.
I learnt so much of the ground realities and their actual constraints. Believe me! It is not easy for them.
I have been in the development sector since then and though it took me 8 years to find my niche; I did end up finding it.
I worked for Ashoka and Indus Action after that and have been with Noora Health for the last 3.5 years.
I love working here because of the autonomy I get, the vision of the organisation - the difference we make with it - and my chemistry with my colleagues.
Noora works with nurses to educate families so that they can take better care of sick ones. It reduces the burden on the health-care system and empowers both nurses and families to do better.
On the personal front - as a family, we have grown to be more respectful of the immediate world that surrounds us. We helped the domestic help community around our house to have better schooling and healthcare access for their children - and felt energised in doing so.
I count this as another plus of marrying my passion to my profession.
Today Dream India is actively present in Tamil Nadu and Bangalore. Many of our initial volunteers still support the cause in their own ways - fundraising, volunteering etc.
We offer educational scholarships, conduct events for children belonging to interior districts, experiment with some mobile libraries and so on.