The world is their oyster...

Two years ago, three teenagers from a village near Pune got a chance to study IB at the Mahindra United World College. Now, they are headed for the US

Anahita Mukherji I TNN

Mulshi (Pune): Asde is a tiny village plagued by power cuts in Pune’s Mulshi taluka where children playing in rocky courtyards shriek with joy when the lights come on after dusk. Not quite the sort of village which sends its girls to America for higher studies.
But then, life can be full of surprises, like it was for Ashwini Bharam and Pramod Nikalje from Asde and Milind Jori from Bhadas, a neighbouring village. These three teenagers, who had never spoken English or seen the outside of their village two years ago, are now headed to the US for undergraduate studies.
Two years ago, the trio’s world changed completely when they were selected to study at the Mahindra United World College, India (MUWCI). MUWCI, spread out on a sprawling campus in Mulshi, is one of the 12 United World Colleges across the globe where students from around the world study together on a single campus.
It all began with Akshara, a social outreach program run in collaboration with MUWCI, which is involved in teaching children from neighbouring villages on the MUWCI campus. Mudit Tyagi, a student from a poor family in UP, who studied at the United World College in the US, was the brain behind Akshara.
Two years ago, the Akshara team suggested getting a few meritorious village kids to study the International Baccalaureate at MUWCI, an idea that the college principal, David Wilkinson, agreed to. And so, Ashwini, Pramod and Milind, who had studied in a Marathi-medium school till Std X, were suddenly catapulted into a world of cultural diversity, on a campus populated by a whole range of skin colours with myriad accents.
The transition wasn’t easy. “I was rather apprehensive for the first few months. The students had to cope with so many changes, not the least of which was to switch from the Marathi medium to the English medium,’’ says Wilkinson.
“At first I couldn’t understand a thing. Everyone spoke in English. All the classes were in English. It just didn’t make sense to me,’’ says Pramod, adding that in the village, students simply studied English to pass the SSC exams. But gradually, they learnt the language by hearing it around them.
It helped to have classmates from countries like Mongolia and Japan, who weren’t too fluent with English, either. “We would point to objects when we didn’t know what they were called,’’ grins Pramod.
And the staff, too, went out of its way to ensure that the trio fitted in. Harsha Joshi, executive director at Akshara, not only worked with the students on campus and drove them to study harder and practise their English, but also frequented their villages to convince their parents of the importance of the programme they were studying.
During the first few months, Pramod, Milind and Ashwini were practically non-resident students; they’d run back home at every opportunity. “The cultural shock was overwhelming,’’ says Nitin Padte, the only Maharashtrian faculty on campus, in whom the students often confided their fears. It was also difficult for them to digest the friendships between boys and girls on campus. “I’d barely spoken to a boy in school,’’ says Ashwini.
But then, after the initial hiccups, the three got caught up in the whirlwind of activity that’s part of life on campus, and began to love the environment they were in. After coming from a school where they simply crammed their texts, they suddenly found themselves participating in classroom discussions and doing their own research. “Out here, examinations aren’t based on textbook answers. We learnt to find the answers for ourselves,’’ says Milind.
“During the first term, they found it so tough to cope with the change in medium that they’d fail in practically every subject,’’ says Padte. Now, however, they have not only mastered the language but made close friends from around the world. “There’s Toshi and Nozomi from Japan, Ada from Hungary, JJ from Mongolia...’’ counts Pramod. Ashwini was “adopted’’ by a gang of Scandinavian girls whom she’s very close to. The village kids now deftly switch from speaking in English with their foreign classmates to talking in Marathi with each other.
“Beneath the skin colour, I’ve learnt that everyone is the same,’’ adds Milind wisely. His Spanish roommate, Pablo Cancelo, says he’s impressed that while the other teens on campus paste posters of their favourite movie stars on the walls, Milind’s wall has a chart on poverty alleviation. “It’s to MUWCI’s credit that it not only has students from European countries studying on campus but also underprivileged students from India,’’ adds Pablo.
The youngsters aren’t ashamed of their background, and have often taken their classmates over to the village. There have been some rather dramatic changes in their appearance, too. For instance, when Joshi first took the three students to Pune to shop for clothes, Ashwini refused to step out of the trial room in jeans, something she’d never worn before. Today, she struts around campus in her bright pink capris, and even sports her new look back home. Pramod, too, now has a floppy hairstyle that his parents in the village aren’t terribly pleased about.
All three of them are now nearing the end of the two-year IB diploma course and have got admission to American universities. Ashwini plans to study economics, while Pramod will study bio-technology. Milind, who’s keen on studying agriculture, says he will return to his village once he is back from the US. “Everyone in my village feels there’s nothing here for them. They want to migrate to cities like Pune. I want to return home and show people how much one can do in a village,’’ he says.
anahita.mukherji@timesgroup.com

A CULTURAL LEAP: Pramod Nikalje (left), Ashwini Bharam and Milind Jori (right) with Milind’s roommates Pablo Cancelo and Morshed Mannan at the MUWCI campus. (Below) Power cuts are a frequent occurrence in Ashwini’s village Asde near Pune