65th Year Independance Day and Fight goes on...

So once again time to see lots of Tricolor flags and hear stories of freedom fighters around us will be coming in 3 days from now. Yes, it is पन्दरा आगस्त, now has become (15th August) a vacation time to enjoy the FREEDOM with closed ones. But because we all have obsessed with our daily machine life, should the holiday on our Independence Day be meant just for relaxing ourselves? Is it the real freedom we are valuing and enjoying or just temporary entertainment and amusements?

With press, media, history Textbooks enforcing Gandhi - Nehru on our mind related to freedom fight, we almost have ignored the real fights of great patriots for our freedom. One among them who continued fight of total freedom till her death is Captain Lakshmi Sehgal, Wiki the Commanding Officer of Women wing (Jhansi Rani Wing) of Azad Hind Fauj (INA). She had left the fight for Freedom not a month before, on Jul 19, 2012. And yet not many of us knows it. She still was saying in her last years of life "Fight goes on!". Read brief of her great unbeatable life here.

The fight she was fighting till her death was the Complete Freedom. We the largest producers of doctors (also sadly exporters!) couldn't able to cure the diseases of our own country people and She was running her own clinic and serving poor and underprivileged patients around Kanpur till the age of 98! If you have read the link about her you might have by now know how great was her life, still not many of us knew about her till her death.

It is only political freedom we had got from Britishers. Economical and Social Freedom is yet to be achieved by us. We have second largest manpower in the world still we are controlled by money super powers. We produce lot more than we can eat, still many crores of people struggle to get daily two times roti. There are lot more such ironies present in our nation that are questioning the freedom of us, still we ignore them and enjoy pseudo freedom within our nuclear machine life.

Is this the way of our living in freedom? Is this the Bharat that lakhs of freedom fighters dreamed while sacrificing their life towards it? Don't we have at least the courtesy of valuing their struggle for freedom? Is this the country which we had thought? Don't we have anything inside us to fight against immorality, injustice? Can't we do more than being a machine, towards our surroundings?

Nation is built and run by people who feel they can do and not by people who live just because they exist. System changes may not happen during a life time but struggle continues and people with cynicism can only become spectator in their life and can't enjoy the play! So think and realize, do you want to be on the ground playing or just simply watching? "Fight goes on!"

Vande Mataram

Paying Back to Society: Our initial contribution

In the last blog I had mentioned how the path of my life has changed from being a spectator and commentator to a real player on the field. I am still the beginner and still much more to learn before I could say I have done something. However I thought the learning experiences of me at this phase of life may guide or motivate some people who wish to come on the field to play rather than sitting behind the fences. So here is a small initiative of my life.

I have been living in my village called Pangala from past one year. It is a small village 9 K.M. from Udupi on the NH 66 (Previously NH17) with 2000 odd population. I am not the first person who had left the "CARRIER" and  the "AUSPICIOUS LIFE" in the cities to start living here. Two Engineer brothers were also living here and had become part of villagers life because they are also priests of our Temple. We three were regularly meeting in RSS shakhas and other functions in the temple. We used to discuss issues related to our village and the society and how to solve them using our knowledge and experience.

The first thing that stroke us was the education to the students of our village. Many of the students were having trouble in understanding the subjects in schools. Since now education has become like programming on a computer, limited with syllabus and without even considering that students have brains, and not hard disk and chip, relevance and useability of subjects' knowledge in real life and making it simple to aid the students to understand the subject is not given much importance. This problem is present irrespective of medium of school they are learning. 

We thought we should address this problem, but none of us had experience as teachers nor we remember all the topics we have learned more than decades back! And we did not had any plans to hire some teachers and turn it into a tuition class as they are also not better than schools. Majorly Maths, Science were the subjects of concern, which are favorites to Engineers! So we decided to get in and solve the problem which we engineers are best in doing! 

Every Sunday evening 5:00 pm onwards our Self Study Supporting Class was scheduled. The students were from 1st Standard to I PU (11th Std) and recently even a BBM student has been given support in her studies. Since it is not a tuition class and we are not regular teachers we were following our own methods of explaining the subjects. Using daily life experiences, real life objects our explanation were making the students realize the education and knowledge gaining as a part of their life. Since we did not wished it to become like another tuition class who only train the students to write in 3 hours of exams, we did only supporting the students to understand better and gain knowledge. We then learned that the capacity and thirst of gaining knowledge about new things is present in every student, we only have to support them and give proper direction to their thinking process.

And then onwards the two hours in a week we will be in a different trans of our life with only aim of making the students understand the subject and gain knowledge. We are experiencing the joy of giving something valuable to them from our own experiences and the things we learned at their age from our teachers. The feeling of paying tribute to all those great teachers we had by transferring efforts of them to these students by supporting their understanding methods itself was sufficient to us than money. The response from villagers were very much encouraging to us. Initially we had planned for 1 hour of class but later it was getting extended to 2 hours with increase in number of students! 

There are lots of cherishing moments in this small effort of us in those 2 hours a week. It will be one more blog again! As I said initially I am still a beginner to express achievements, so I am restricting this blog to the initial phase of this initiative. After started life this way I am feeling there are lots of things to learn and do in the society and things can surely change and it has to be us to change it. Together lets continue the journey of building strong self sustaining Bharath...

Vande Mataram