FULL MARKS - Special KIDS, extra-special GURU

Archana Rodrigues is the only academic from Maharashtra to have won a Guruvar award for her commitment to inclusive education

Sharmila Ganesan-Ram | TNN

Kids don’t have to tell a carrot from a radish in order to be able to join this small school tucked away in a leafy residential colony of Dombivli. Unlike those institutions, which grill teething infants and nervous parents alike in the hope of a hundred per cent SSC success rate, St Joseph’s does not subject its toddler applicants to interviews before admissions. “After all, everyone has the right to education,’’ says Archana Rodrigues, the principal, who calls the hype around SSC an “overplayed aura’’ and given a choice, would rather encourage the weak, slow learners—the kind who score 37 per cent with grace marks and then grow up to perhaps shine in unexpected ways.

It’s this instinct that, years ago, made Rodrigues opt for the arts stream despite scoring well in her tenth-standard exams and also induced her to replace her longstanding dream of ‘being a magistrate and changing the world’ with that of ‘being a teacher and changing a classroom’, instead. “It’s child’s play to teach an intelligent student; the true challenge of the educator is to teach the kid who cannot easily follow what you want him to learn,’’ discovered this champion of inclusive education in the course of her career. Last month, for her decade-long efforts in this field, Rodrigues received a surprise call summoning her to Delhi, where she was directed to a premium Club suite at the Taj. After all, she had been chosen from among 15,728 candidates as the Outstanding Teacher for children with special needs, at the Guruvar awards, recently instituted to recognise the critical role of teachers in shaping the community. Rodrigues is the only teacher from Maharashtra to have won the award, for which the nominations came from students, ex-students, parents and colleagues all over India.

The trophy, which was handed over by Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal, stands tall on her office table. For the past few days, in the glow of this trophy, Rodrigues has been attending incessant calls. She’s also been contemplating ways to invest her cash prize of Rs 10 lakh in the revamp of the school, perhaps another new yellow school bus. But the most important reassurance that she finds in the award is that “more and more teachers will be motivated to join the profession which is otherwise associated with bad payscales and poor working conditions’’.

“A teacher has to emit positive energy, harbour love for kids and believe in oneself,’’ says Rodrigues, who, during her post-graduation in counselling, realised the need for counselling kids with special needs. As there were very few professionals working in this field, she decided to enroll for SNDT’s Master’s degree in special education. Here, as part of her research thesis she developed a training module to impart sex education to mentally challenged children, which was selected for presentation at the National Conference at Dehradun.

Sensitising the special kids’ parents (who tend to be in denial mode) and society towards their needs ranks high in her list of priorities. Rodrigues cites the instance of one woman who was extremely unhappy with the treatment meted out to her Down’s syndrome-affected, hyperactive son by his special school—the teacher would lock him up and beat him. So the woman decided to enrol herself in a teachers’ training session and now confidently takes care of her son, who studies in St Joseph’s. “She even donated part of her first paycheck to our school,’’ recalls Rodrigues, who has always championed the cause of “breaking down institutions for special kids and going in for an inclusive set-up where both regular and special kids can mingle and learn from each other’’.

But turning a regular school into one that advocates an inclusive education system in 2006 was not without its share of teething troubles. When her school started enrolling special kids, many of the regular students dropped out. Parents of ‘regular’ kids raised apprehensions, the most popular one (“and the most irrational one’’) being that this inclusion would be detrimental to the progress of their wards. During a PTA meeting when parents raised the usual fears, Rodrigues recalls a parent of a regular child challenging the argument by citing the example of her own ward. “The mother said that the kind of understanding and maturity her child had developed over the past few years in the company of special kids was exemplary,’’ recalls Rodrigues.

Within the school, which banks chiefly on parental references to get more students, Rodrigues has observed a very healthy mutual learning relationship between both the groups. “During picnics the special kids, who are slightly older than regular students of their batch, are very protective of them. Also, they volunteer at various sports events and this interaction boosts their confidence,’’ she says. The special kids are acquainted with the ways of the outside world through weekly visits to public places; they are even taught cooking and elementary finance. Special kids, Rodrigues concludes, are “non-judgmental’’ unlike the regular ones who “expect you to go out of your way.’’

The 36-year-old teacher sounds a bit like Aamir Khan of Taare Zameen Par when she says the need is not to evolve the curriculum but to evolve better teaching methods. When the movie was released, she received a lot of calls from students telling her that it reminded them of her. Rodrigues takes it as a compliment. “In fact, I want to invite Aamir to my school and share his suggestions,’’ she says. That, for now, qualifies as the school’s own special need.

CLASS ACT Rodrigues is planning to invest her cash prize in a new yellow school bus

Cadre of educators to train teachers: Sibal

New Delhi, Sep 5 (PTI) Taking forward the process of reforms in education, Union Minister Kapil Sibal today announced that a cadre of dedicated educators would be created to provide training and advanced skills to teachers to keep them updated with the latest in the field.

"We are trying to embark upon an exercise under which we will have a whole cadre of educators who will reach out to the teaching community to help them learn, unlearn and relearn things," he said after giving away Teachers' Award to meritorious teachers from CBSE affiliated schools here.

The HRD Minister said that teachers need to update themselves with the emerging knowledge and the new technology in the sphere of education.

The educators would introduce the teachers to latest technology for making the teaching more innovative and lively.

Sibal said it is a challenging task to ensure that the teachers are updated with the new knowledge.

Teachers in twenties play professor & pal for students

Sharmila Ganesan-Ram | TNN

Mumbai: Studying animal behaviour is not the only reason zoology professor Conrad Cabral allows his students to eat in the classroom and at times raise a racket. For Cabral, who completed his MA in zoology two years ago, these are liberties that lead to evolution. Perhaps that’s why, after a particularly exhausting lab session, the 29-year-old brings out his laptop to play computer games with the boys, discusses Britney Spears with the girls and occasionally accompanies the bunch to the nearby burger joint.

To his students, Cabral, who walks into St Xavier’s College in jeans and T-shirt, is as much professor as friend, for the generation gap is negligible. This dual role is characteristic of all who belong to the small but significant population of teachers in their twenties. While more elderly professors are treated like parent-figures, younger teachers are thought of as siblings or friends. “In class, I command respect. Outside, I am their buddy,’’ says Cabral, who interacts with his students on SMS, email and blogs.

Some senior teachers may turn up their nose at his lenient ways, but Cabral, who uses powerpoint presentations in most lectures because “I can’t draw’’, has other twenty-somethings for company. These teachers don’t demand pin-drop silence or subject students to fiery lectures if they are late.

“If a lecture of mine is boring, students don’t mind telling me so,’’ says 29-yearold Deepak Mathew, professor of psychology at Wilson College. When he joined in 2005, Mathew was fresh out of college and didn’t want to appear strict to students. So, “I went to the opposite extreme. I wouldn’t pull them up for
not paying attention,’’ he recalls. Two years later, he found the middle path. “Now they call me a taskmaster,’’ says Mathew, whose success stories include a dyslexic student initially reprimanded by many for choosing psychology. “She was among the top five students in that batch,’’ recalls Mathew.

Although not a lucrative profession, “there are many advantages like respect, job satisfaction and timings,’’ says 21-year-old Anushi Chaturvedi, who has just completed her first term (six months) as visiting faculty for Ruia’s media programme. For her subject, ‘Features and opinion’, Chaturvedi subscribed to online newsletters and encouraged students to analyse and compare stories. If they didn’t submit assignments on time, students would flood her inbox with apologetic SMSes. Chaturvedi, who will shortly fly to the UK to study journalism, says being almost the same age dissolves inhibitions. “Once, we had a good laugh over a daily sex advisory column,’’ she recalls.

Speaking the language of the youth, “Hinglish or other language cocktails’’, helps. “If they see somebody who talks, dresses and looks like them and is more in tune with their experiences, the ice is easier to break,’’ says Gauri Sarda, psychology lecturer at SNDT, Matunga. She uses modern examples like the Queer Azadi march, the MTV Roadies show and the latest nail-polish ad to talk about how media influences behaviour. Since, “I am perceived as a single woman who may have similar problems,’’ says Sarda, students freely broach subjects like ex-boyfriends without fear of being judged.

Although the fear of being taken for granted haunts this tribe, it isn’t all that easy to pull the wool over their young eyes. One boy in 24-year-old Suman Kalra’s class of media students constantly listened to music on his I-pod. “One day I fired the hell out of him,’’ she recalls. Another time, in reply to a student who directly copied from the internet for a project on the East India Company, Kalra emailed him a PDF document of the internet page. “You have to draw the line somewhere,’’ she says.

Sometimes, the line is automatically drawn. When 29-year-old Saravanan Vijaykumar, who joined the faculty of IIT-B three months ago, plays basketball, students ask him “Which year?’’ After he clarifies, “The ball always comes to me.’’

Psychology professor Deepak Mathew (right) with his students

Old students build house for poor teacher 25 yrs on

Radha Venkatesan | TNN

Coimbatore: A sterling example of gratitude set by ex-students towards a man who turned them into doctors and industrialists is bound to tug at many hearts. It’s just a 1,200 sq ft house in a nondescript village in Namakkal district of western Tamil Nadu. But behind its sparkling beige coloured walls lies a unique expression of love: it’s a gift from students to their poor, old teacher.

For over three decades, from mid-1950s to 1984, Tamil teacher Soballapuram V Venkataraman inspired awe among his students, not with his striking stick, but his stirring Tamil poetry and oratory. Two years ago, when the old boys of the Sengunthar Mahajana Higher Secondary school at Gurusamypalayam village met their 83-year-old former teacher, they were shocked. Their guru lived in a leaky, rented house, with his widowed daughter and an aged wife.

On a monthly pension of Rs 9,000, he was additionally burdened by debts incurred for the marriage of his two daughters. On hearing about the hard times he was fallen in, around 250 of the school’s alumni decided to gift him a Guru Niwas. It was their tribute to an inspiring teacher. “Although he taught me in the 1950s, I still remember his Tamil classes. He was our favourite,’’ says 60-plus, retired municipal commissioner, Ardhanari.

Contributions from old students, including two police officers settled in north India, and many others including doctors and engineers, poured in. ACoimbatore-based industrialist contributed about Rs 1.35 lakh. In less than two years, a two-storey house was ready on a Rs 10 lakh budget. The house would be handed over to him on September 6, a day after Teacher’s Day. “I never asked my old students for help. Neither did I tell them anything about my financial problems. But they offered to build a house for me. I am moved by their gesture,’’ said the octogenarian.

A CLASS APART: Around 250 ex-students of Tamil teacher Soballapuram V Venkataraman (inset) have built their poor, debt-ridden teacher a 1,200 sq ft house in TN’s Namakkal district. The home would be handed over on Sept 6, a day after Teacher’s Day

IITians opt to become gurus

Shruthi Balakrishna | TNN

Bangalore: Their days of sitting and listening are over. Now, they will do the talking. In a swift role reversal, a few IITians will be playing the role of lecturer, as a new bunch of students takes the seats.

Blame it on recession or a passion for teaching, a good number of IITians have grabbed teaching posts in various universities and institutions across the country.

These students are offered positions of assistant professor, associate professor, senior lecturer and lecturer. Though they admitted that the salary package is lower compared to MNCs, they feel teaching is “one of the most secure jobs”. According to information provided by the IITs, the salary is on a par with the UGC scales and above. A few said it varies between an average of Rs 3.4 lakh and Rs 9 lakh per annum.

Some students who have opted for teaching have had some experience. Like Akshita Srivastva, an MSc from IITRoorkee, was interested in teaching from the beginning and has also taught a few students when she was in Class X. After joining IIT, she wanted to pursue her passion. “My family was supportive of my decision. I will be teaching BTech students. As a teacher, I will be neither too strict nor too liberal,” she added.

Anil Kumar, an MTech from IIT-Bombay, too, has worked as lecturer in two colleges in Kota before. Offered the post of assistant professor in Lovely Professional University, he said that due to recession, not many big firms visited the campus.

Even as most students took the job as it’s a safe bet, some felt teaching would help them pursue research. As Sandip Majumdar, who is doing PhD at IIT-Kharagpur, puts it, “If I opt for teaching, I can pursue research. The salaries are low, but still teaching is interesting. Interacting with students is really exciting,” he said. Asked if he’ll consider an offer in a company, he added: “If the company is good, I’ll consider moving, else I’ll stick to teaching.”

He puts his heart and soul to model a picture perfect train

Roana Maria Costa | TNN

Mumbai: He takes a photograph and converts it into a blueprint. Raw material is painstakingly moulded into miniature parts. For hours on end, he crouches over a cluttered work table to build perfect little models of train engines, keeping alive a passion that revved to life nearly 20 years ago.

C L Singh, a section engineer at the tool room at the Parel workshop of the Central Railways, is the proud creator of 38 miniature train engines, including a 1928 rock engine used in steam trains. For Singh, everything starts with a picture.

Perched on a high stool in his home at the Trombay Railway Quarters in Chembur, Singh, who looks relaxed in army pants and a light brown tee, says his workshop is where he finds nirvana. “I was always artistically inclined, and never dreamt of joining the Railways. But my parents passed away when I was six, and I moved from Jhansi to Mumbai to stay with my sister. Her husband worked in the Parel workshop and after I finished my SSC, I joined as an apprentice,’’ says 56-year-old Singh, as he cuts white sheets of tough plastic which will be shaped into windows grills of an electric train engine.

Singh’s workshop—one of the two bedrooms of his flat—is lined with ceiling-high shelves stocked with prototypes in glass boxes bearing the names of the train engine models. “The family accommodates itself in the other room, besides there is always space in the hall,’’ he says. “I have all the tools I require. Some of the materials I use are very fine. I get them from old umbrellas, cycle spares and used fireworks.’’ In the room are a plastic cutting machine used to cut synthetic sheets, bench vices, a hacksaw, a grinding machine, a buffing machines and air compressors used for spray painting. Somewhere in the corner is a black bicycle. “Work ends at 3:45 pm. After that it’s a train from Parel to Kurla, from where I pick up my cycle parked near platform number 9 and peddle home,’’ he says. This practice helps him keep fit, save time and a few rupees.

Friends and colleagues, intrigued by his hobby, are always ready to help with pictures of rare train engines and raw material. A model takes at least a month to finish with a minimum of four hours of work every evening. His wife Usha is a great cook, he says, but when he’s midmodel, not even her food can entice him.

Singh, whose largest replica is a 140-tonne crane that weighs over 10 kg and is six-and-a-half-feet long, has exhibited his work at various railway exhibitions at CST, the Thane Railway Institute and the Lokmanya Tilak Engineering College. He is grateful for the support he has received from his employer. “I started making train engine replicas twenty years ago, after I married Usha and we moved into the Railway quarters. My daughter Deepti and my son Devendra help me out but are not hands on,’’ he says.

Usha enters the room at this point. “I never clean his desk. I sweep the room but never touch the desk since I don’t understand the importance of the small parts lying around,’’ she says. Singh enjoys listening to old Hindi film songs, but when he starts working, the music, like everything else, fades into the background. “I am not a person who enjoys going out. At the end of tiring day, this is where I find solace.’’

All his work is self-funded—as much as 30% of his salary goes into indulging this hobby. He is undeterred by this and the increasing strain on his eyes ever since he had a cataract operation in 1997. He refuses to sell his work. “People approach me but I can never think of selling my work,’’ he says. “Each creation is added to the collection. I never make the same piece twice. Usha never complains, who will she complain too? My family is very supportive.’’

TRAINED HANDS: C L Singh, a section engineer with the Central Railways, works on protoypes of train engines as a hobby.

‘I am addicted to my passion for teaching’

60-Year-Old Lily Sawant Gives Lessons in Maths, English And Moral Science As A Volunteer

Ketan Tanna I TNN

The best way to describe 60-year-old Lily Sawant is that she is a serial volunteer. For the last 38 years, Sawant has been teaching students in Delhi, Aurangabad and Mumbai. When asked why she didn’t opt for teaching as a profession, she giggles. “I am addicted to teaching and not to money.

Mana lagli chand, Govind Govind,” she says, quoting a Tukaram abhang, which translates as, “I got addicted to my passion for teaching.” It all began in 1972, when she joined her research scholar husband at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “During the holidays, especially in the afternoons, many teachers would take a nap and their children would play in the hot sun. One day, I decided that I should make them utilise their time constructively. I had graduated in chemistry and was very fond of maths. So, I devised puzzles and stories to teach them maths and even English,” she says.

When her husband got a job in Aurangabad University, she continued to teach in that town. In 1984, there was a drought in Aurangabad and other parts of Marathwada. The armed forces had advertised for entry-level posts and hundreds of youngsters from peasant families wanted to get in. To do so, they needed to pass an entrance exam and English was compulsory. Sawant was contacted by a colonel who asked if she could help. “All my boys passed. It was a cent per cent result,” she says proudly. “They came to me with a box of pedas and told me that whichever part of the world they ended up in, they would never forget me.”

Sawant moved to Mumbai with her husband in 1988. For the last 10 years, she has been teaching her favourite subjects—mathematics, English and moral science—as a volunteer in different schools. In 1995, when she was teaching science to students at a municipal school, she had to use a projector for a slide display. Her mind started ticking and she wondered how the visually impaired learned their lessons. Curiosity took her to Vikas Shorewalla, a visually challenged person from Charni Road, who taught her the basics of Braille.

A few months later, someone told her that children from a home for the blind were looking for a maths teacher for their board exam. The hitch was that though Sawant had learnt basic Braille, she didn’t know maths Braille, which had its own rules. But she started learning it and taught not only the students of that batch but four other batches as well. “My entire batch passed with good marks. When some of them got jobs, they came to me with gifts. That’s my reward. I don’t need money or a proper job to get satisfaction. Helping people grow and do well in life has its own joy,” she says.

For four years, Sawant has been teaching underprivileged children at the Baljivan Trust in Santa Cruz. She teaches them maths and science in Marathi, English and Hindi. She also trains students in disaster management.

Now that she is 60 and getting on, does she plan to take a break? “Not at all,”she retorts, aghast at the very thought. “I like to teach and I like to talk. If I don’t do both, I will go mad.”
(Lily Sawant can be contacted on 022-26670213)

ON A MISSION: For four years, Sawant has been teaching deprived children at Baljivan Trust in Santa Cruz

‘It changes your perspective’

At 22, when most are raring for a corporate career, Amit Mistry joined the Teach for America initiative. “I wanted to do something service-oriented before starting my career.” His choice was made easier by his stint as a teaching assistant during his undergraduate chemical engineering studies. “And I also enjoyed volunteering with kids,” says Amit, now 30, and working with a Democrat Congressman on various health and education issues.

The BS in chemical engineering from Rice University taught high school chemistry, physical science and algebra for two years in New Orleans. An experience that was not without its initial hiccups, challenges and as it is with any clear-minded and noble endeavour—the inevitable rewards. “It was extremely difficult to go from being a student at my university to being in charge of my own classroom.”

But Amit managed well enough. In the two years, he realised that to make science appealing to kids, designing lessons and assignments and, all the while, maintaining discipline were anything but child’s play. Once he got into the groove, though, Amit found himself enjoying the time. “I felt especially rewarded after a good lesson, when I felt students left my classroom learning something new or being able to do something they couldn't do before.”

But education is also about shared memories and character building. Amit recalls organising a Saturday cleanup, where many of his students helped clean the campus and repaint the gazebo. “I also remember sharing quite a few laughs with students. One of my chemistry students proclaimed during a lecture, ‘May the phosphorus be with you, Mr Mistry’. And I remember a student interrupting an exam when he noticed my name was in the word ‘chemistry’.”

Clearly, says Amit, he is a better communicator today because of the experience. “I also have a better perspective on many problems affecting under-served communities in the US.”

The young teacher moved on to do a PhD in bioengineering from Rice University and also obtained a teaching certificate from the State of Louisiana. He then worked at Research!America on various science policy and advocacy issues. Recently, in September, Amit began a Congressional Science and Engineering Fellowship sponsored by the Materials Research Society and the Optical Society of America. For the fellowship, Amit works for Congressman Edward J Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, on various health and education issues.

Becoming a leader IN THE CLASSROOM OF LIFE

Akanksha founder Shaheen Mistri describes her 20-year-long journey from teaching a group of kids in a small shanty in Mumbai to the Teach For India movement

When I was 18, I walked into a slum and started teaching. I had spent my life outside of India, graduating from a small, elite girl's private school in upmarket Greenwich, Connecticut, in the US. Back in India, curious, I walked into a Mumbai slum and was confronted by the deep inequity of a world where some kids attended top-notch academies while others just didn’t go to school at all.

Entering the slum on that first day, I was prepared to feel disturbed, sad, and angry. I wasn’t prepared for the bright eyes filled with untapped potential. Within a few days, without language, coming from a very different world, I found a base in a little home and started teaching.

Those days stay vivid in my mind; sitting on the floor of a 10 foot loft in Shakeel’s shanty with a growing group of kids of all ages around me. So many memories—cutting out alphabet ladders to teach three year-old Sameena, who is now in Sophia College; seeing a young girl on fire and rushing her to the hospital; looking for space to teach in a school and getting turned away by a nun who felt that her students would get diseases from our children—the idea is good, she said, but “revolutionary”.

And then, after 20 schools said no, finding our first classrooms in the Holy Name School. My days were immersed in thinking about children—trying to understand who they were, making sense of the communities that they lived in, discovering the deep prejudices that exist in society against them, trying to learn ways to make them engage in learning.

For the next 18 years, we built an organization, Akanksha, “aspiration”, that grew out of those days of teaching. Akanksha’s deep belief that every child has immense potential has created opportunities for thousands of less privileged children. And from our teachers, and from our children, I have learned my most significant life lessons. Take Rajshree, whose unshakeable belief in Sumeet through a decade of work where he tried to commit suicide several times, juggling huge home problems with repeated attempts to pass the SSC who today embarks on a journey to run his own NGO and has been nominated as MTV’s youth icon. Or Niki, who has rented a tiny home in the slum which is an after-school center for extra help. Or Nahida, one of our Akanksha alumni, who today teaches three year olds through song and dance. Or Anjali, whose kids after being relocated two hours away still commute to come to her class.

Often when I have thought I understood something, the Akanksha children have taught me that I really hadn’t. I don’t think I understood what it means to persevere until I saw a 17 year old Akanksha child get sexually abused in her home, have a baby, give it up for adoption, and come back to school. I don’t think I understood courage until I saw an Akanksha teenage boy stand up in a group of kids and parents and break down saying to his mother how much he loved her and had never told her that. I don’t think I understood what it meant to give until our student Latif passed away a few months ago; his grandfather told me that he had given him Rs 14,000—all his savings—to go to a private hospital. Latif quietly put it back, going instead to a government hospital.

From countless teachers and children I have seen how what matters the most is connecting, caring, believing in another person.

And then, a couple of years ago, I began to feel increasingly overwhelmed. As the stories of success with children increased, so did the realization that real change needs to be systemic; that quality needs to be scaled to reach every child. On one hand was this grave, overwhelming inequity and on the other was a huge dearth of talented minds addressing the issue.

The idea of Teach For India began through a conversation with Anand Shah, a friend and thought partner, who spoke about his vision for a domestic service program in India that got young Indians engaged in changing the country. A small group of us from Indicorps, The Piramal Foundation and Akanksha started talking about what a “Teach For India” would be.

Through that time, four Teach For America alumni came through Akanksha. I was struck by their mission, by their deep commitment to end inequity. These young people—some of the brightest—had chosen to spend two years in incredibly challenging classrooms.

A few months later, I met Wendy Kopp at the Teach For America office in New York. We talked about children and India and inequity and I left asking her to come to India. Intrigued by the possibility of some form of Teach For America’s idea working elsewhere, Wendy spent a few days in India-in schools, on campuses, with business and education leaders.

Wendy left and our discussions intensified. We worked closely with McKinsey and Co to e x a m i n e the feasibility of Teach For India in a context so vastly different from the U.S. At the end of the three month long study, we were convinced that Teach For India was not only possible, but critical.

The challenges of building the Teach For India movement are immense. The idea seems preposterous to many. Why would the best minds in the country teach? How can a force of a few thousand idealist, untrained young people bridge the stark achievement gap in our struggling schools? Why would corporate India (especially in the current financial crisis) encourage their best talent to go for two years? Teach For India will answer these questions with action. Already, applications are pouring in. Already, the most visionary companies are signing up. And we know that our first hundred Fellows, trained and supported, will define a new way of teaching, a new way of learning, a new way of being.

So, Teach For India now seems the right thing to do. For TFI’s fellows, this is a chance to study leadership in a classroom of life. For TFI’s students, this is a chance for them to bridge their staggering achievement gap, feel cared and valued and experience meaningful learning. And as the movement gains momentum and grows across the country, we will move closer to our vision that one day, every child across India will attain an excellent education.

They splash colours on bleak backgrounds

Sibi Arasu I TNN

They add a smidgen of colour to bleak cityscapes. For over seven years now, Himanshu S, an artist and teacher at the Rachna Sansad College Of Fine Art, and his friends have been going around Mumbai conducting art workshops and interactive sessions for those who don’t get a chance to express their opinions and can’t afford a fancy summer workshop to fine-tune their painting skills and art aesthetic. From a half-day painting session at a remand home in Matunga to a month-long workshop with the people of Koliwada in Dharavi, they’ve done, and continue to do, it all.

Himanshu, who is one of the core members of the group of avant-garde artists and painters who call themselves the Common Room Collective, says their art deals more with the people and less with art galleries. “For me, painting and ‘proper art’ are secondary; the work that I do with people has greater meaning and more priority in my life,’’ he says. “It’s more about the process of doing than the final product itself.’’

The workshops do not follow any set pattern and the collective tries to keep them as unstructured as possible. “When we go to a place, we don’t go with a pre-determined idea of all the things that we want to do; we do have a rough idea but we take it as it comes. I usually ask the kids to paint whatever they want to and then go on to do other things after that,’’ says Himanshu.

A few months ago, The Collective took part in the Urban Typhoon workshop in Koliwada, Dharavi, where they conducted a month-long workshop for the kids in the area. During the course of this, they painted on the roads, the walls, and any space that they could find in the slum. This was conducted simultaneously along with other ‘serious’ studies to figure out a wholly inclusive redevelopment plan for the area. One of the ideas that Himanshu proposed to the kids was to paint their dream home, and he says some of the ideas the kids came up with were mindblowing. “I know their sketches are not going to be taken into account in any slum redevelopment plan, but I really think authorities and city planners should just glance through them at least—after all, the houses are going to be built for them,’’ he says.

The children and even the adults who take part in the workshops conducted by Himanshu and the collective find it a unique experience. Little attention is paid to the final product; the process is what matters. As the workshops progress, the lines between those conducting the workshop and those attending get blurred, with everyone becoming an artist and painter and creator of masterpieces.

Himanshu reiterates his workshops will always be more about ‘how’ rather than ‘what’ art is produced. At the same time, he feels he cannot do with painting, as “the inherent honesty of the drawn line makes it the best vehicle for the voice of dissent’’.

With further events with people of different communities and groups across the city lined up, Himanshu is a quite busy for a self-styled “aimless wanderer’’. He is helping organise another month-long workshop at Koliwada where his group plans, along with the kids of course, to paint the walls of the houses in the area. A gallery exhibition of some of his earlier works is also on the menu. However, he doesn’t give this too much importance. “As long as I want to paint, I’d like to be doing the other things that I do,’’ he says.

sibi.arasu@timesgroup.com

LITTLE ARTIST: At the Dharavi workshop, children painted on the roads, walls and any space that they could fin.

TOI Article - 24/12/2007 - The brilliant couple behind 'Taare Zamen Par'

A couple inspired by lives of little stars

Anahita Mukherji I TNN

Mumbai: In 1999, Amole Gupte and his wife Deepa Bhatia wrote a one-page story about a boy who does badly at studies and is sent to boarding-school as punishment, where he meets his saviour, a teacher who turns his life around. Over the next nine years, they dived into the lives of hundreds of children in order to explore their world first hand. Almost a decade of research and adventure went into Taare Zameen Par (TZP), a film on childhood.
Amole’s connection with children has been almost umbilical. “I started taking care of my neighbour’s children while growing up. Later, when my friends got married, I would babysit their children when they were out partying,’’ he says. In fact, the lead character in TZP, Ishaan, is named after his best friend’s son.
He does not believe in talking down to children. There’s no “Sir’’ or “Uncle’’ for Amole. The children call him ‘Mendhak Chacha’ or ‘Amole frog’, a character he created.
After writing the story, the duo began what has now become a lifelong association with several city schools, including Tulip and Saraswati Mandir that are meant for children with multiple disabilities. It’s at these special schools that they witnessed miracles.
Once, at Tulips, they saw a seven-year-old with her head between her legs, shrieking continuously for an hour. They were a little sceptical when the school’s principal and trustee, Medha Lotlikar, said that all children were ‘normal’ and should study together. To their astonishment, a year later, they found the same girl holding the railing and walking down the staircase with the other children. Though the girl had initially been diagnosed with a number of disabilities, visual impairment turned out to be the only one she had.
Amole-himself an actor, writer, painter and directorhas conducted countless workshops in numerous schools, where children were exposed to just about everything from Tagore’s poetry to Renaissance paintings and theatre. It’s here that he chose the actors for the film. He never called children to the studio or asked them to audition for him. “I would tell them bits and pieces from the story and all of us (the children and Amole) would take turns acting the scenes out. The children never knew they were rehearsing for the film,’’ he says.
Although the film revolves around a dyslexic child, the incidents could be about any child. A scene where Ishaan bunks school and gets his brother to write a note saying he was sick, is similar to the time Amole himself bunked in Class III and got a neighbourhood ‘auntie’ to write the note for him.
Another scene, where Ishaan gets a stray dog to eat his report card is inspired by a number of children who hide their report cards from their parents. The art teacher in the film—Nikumbh Sir—is named after Amole’s own art teacher at school “who was like a breathe of fresh air in an otherwise structured system of education’’. For Amole and Deepa, inclusive education is not about adding “four bad mangoes to ten good ones, but realising that all the mangoes are from the same tree’’.
Says Amole, “Inclusion is not an act of charity towards the ‘slow ones’ but an attempt at creating a more caring society. After all, the speed of a herd of animals is determined, not by the fastest in the pack, but by the slowest. They don’t create a separate division for the ‘slow ones’.’’
anahita.mukherji@timesgroup.com

HAPPY FAMILY: Deepa Bhatia and Amole Gupte, who spent a decade researching for TZP, with son Partho at their Khar home