Coordinator’s View                                           Best Teacher?

 

Being a power-sector engineer and then taking a plunge after superannuation in the educational initiative focused on mentoring deprived children has been a big challenge. The only driving force was an inspiration to pursue it with a sense of Personal Social Responsibility (PSR). This inspiration provided increasing justification of living advanced age and tending to make it a spiritual realization.

Yet having spent active part of life right from childhood to the end of professional career in learning and practicing it to the best of capability had created an inquisitiveness to learn from some of the persons considered to be stalwart in giving their best to needy; some called it philanthropy, for a few it was giving back to the society, while many it was a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Most of them were non-transparent. The kind of non-transparency in doing good to needy is not comprehensible. Such a scenario created an inquisitiveness to know why there are so millions of needy, despite a huge claims of so many charitable hearts, NGOs and state programs to uplift poor and deprived persons.

In the process incidentally, I happened to read about my senior Anorbotto Roy, popularly known as Dunu Rory. After graduation in 1967 as a Chemical Engineer from IIT Bombay, and M.Tech in 1969, did not prefer MNC career. Rather, he preferred to start Vidushak Karyashala at coal-belt Shahdol, M.P. It was aimed at empowering .rural folk to learn to help themselves to improve upon their agriculture and in turn their life by maintaining, repairing and making best possible use of their resources. He did not stop at that and continued to widen scope and scale of his activities of social upliftment and empowerment.

Being an engineer, there was a natural inclination to know and learn  from Dunu what inspired him to become a social worker by giving up a cherished career of an IITian? How can I best pursue our PSR driven educational initiative? Reply of Dunu that “Experience is the Best Teacher”, perplexed me. It erupted in me many questions – is he avoiding me to share his experience? Does he see me as his competitor?  Can there be competition in social welfare?

Going ahead with questions on the initiative chosen as a path of no-return, every sunrise came with a new set of problems. Holding deprived children to learn continuously, their social-economic-health-family constraints, their low level of academic understanding, lack of resources both financial and manpower were too retarding. 

Education and learning has grown to an extent that even some of the best universities across the globe are offering graduation and post-graduation in social work. Honestly having pursued research from an IIT after retirement had definitely not left any patience to restart academic learning in social work. By virtue of age and stage desperation continues to grow to do as much as possible. The basic reason is huge need of education as a means of social welfare is widening. Every step towards economic growth and affordability is fueling greed to acquire more, the best pasture for commercialization of education.

It is said that learning from experience of others is better than learning from mistakes and experiments. But, such kind of social initiatives are unique in their own domain.   None has experience in pursuing such an initiative in non-organizational, non-remunerative, non-commercial and non-political manner. Moreover, the Zero-Fund-&-Zero-Assert (ZFZA) financial model in an age where popular belief ‘money makes a mere go’ is least fascinating.

Despite, perseverance of last more than eight years has lead to evolution of Interactive Online Mentoring Sessions (IOMS), Mentors’ Manual and this Web-Bulletin Gyan Vigyan Sarita: शिक्षा. With the passage of time it is growing richer in its diversity, contents and complementing of efforts from a wider cross-section specially children diverse  

Conclusion: Now I confess that Dunu was right to advise me that experience is the best teacher. Had you either shared your experience, which advised was out of context for me, would have killed ingenuity, made me stereotyped. In the field of humanities there are many theories, and more than often they contradict each other. But, in the field of science there are laws that predict reproducibility within the known constraints. But, in humanities every problem is unique and require unique solution since every individual, context, circumstances and times are different. As long as  a social initiative is pursued passionately, desperately, with full honesty and selflessness, nothing is wrong. At every step one may encounter a score of advisers and critics. Listen to them, but with a caution, they cannot walk a single step along; let them be happy at it.