Sunday, October 29, 2017

Pragathi and the slip ups :)

Yesterday I was attending a charity event of Pragathi a non profit organization that spear heads providing education in underprivileged areas of state of Karnataka. 

All great, hats off to their efforts and the scale of their work is just mind blowing, all was  good till they started talking about their new initiative. The initiative to teach English to underprivileged children along with Kannada and math is definitely an appreciative incentive. 

The narrator for this new initiative started with his and his partners journey to India and they visited a village near T. Narasipura in Mysore district and they visited a colony of “untouchables”, he  translated to Kannada "ಹೊಲೆಯರಗೇರಿ", the narrator mentioned that it was not all dirty but pretty clean, in that location lived the winner of the scholarship who is the daughter of a child bride whose dad passed away while she was young. The presentation narrated the hardships the mother faced after her husbands death and despite all odds how she has managed to bring up 2 well educated children.  The narrator ended the story with how the essay winner girl in question cannot achieve her full potential and that is solely because she lacks knowledge of English language and we can make a difference in lives of such people. 

Wonderful, I am all for this initiative and I have heard time and again from my dad about one of our own village boys who is unable to secure a job despite being an under graduate degree holder himself and reason being he cannot communicate in English.

The question I have is, what impact the presentation would have had if the presenter hadn’t mentioned the girls caste? The funny part is that the narrator failed to name the girls village or her name but was first to highlight untouchability.

Considering we are in 21st century India and we have had freedom for last 60 years and enough government sops in the name of caste, including but not limited to cement roads in their neighborhoods and affordable housing under different government schemes, are they really truly still untouchables?

To top it all, the girls brother holds an under graduate degree and is currently unemployed (I don’t understand how is it even possible, but that’s a different topic). Where and how did he study? or for that matter the girl who wrote the essay. is she being discriminated for being an “untouchable”? if yes how did she even write an award winning essay?

Considering the presentation was made here in USA in a 3rd country and mostly to Kannada people, could they have not used better words?

Is Pragati for all its forward and progressive thinking wants to go backwards by naming the caste of the person who is smart and intelligent?

Maybe I am over reacting but considering I have lived in USA for last 18 years and have attended multiple such charity events be it from AID or ASHA or Art of Living among others, I have always heard words like underprivileged and economically backwards but never the blatant mention of ones religion let alone caste. I always look at politicians from India specially from Congress party and call them pseudo secular's but this small incident yesterday made me realize such people are not 24 hours by flight away but much closer than I imagine.

I am hoping it was just a slip and no special intent behind mentioning those words.

Printer Cartridge update 2

Remember my post on refilled cartridges back over a year ago, shortly after I published the post the ink went dry and this time in month of August I went ahead and bought new cartridges. 

I am happy to say, they lasted almost 14 months, they went dry couple of days ago. In the end of this experiment, my conclusion is refilling a cartridge is worth while once, twice or max thrice beyond that one is better off buying new cartridges.