I was finally back from Calcutta ! The heat had taken its toll on me - throat infection,fever. So, the day started with me meeting these guys at the Baruipur station.This was my second field trip and I was visibly excited. I had missed on the other 2 because of my illness :(.  We were to go to Mograhat, to cover the “Adarini” project. This project is one year old and is aimed at eradicating child marriages from this block which consists of 14 Gram Panchayats in next 5 years.We …

After the absolutely fabulous program at Malay Mukherjee’s place (more about this later) and having pissed off the fathers and nuns at Dashari (more about this later too), I woke up late to the sound of one of the nuns knocking at my door. She had kept breakfast for us even at 9.30 in the morning. Brush. Chana. Bread. Tea. Bath. Nishtha at 11am. Shruti was unwell and so was at home in Calcutta. Tapoti di, Phani and I thus set off for Umarpota, a small village which took us …

Just before our work day got over, we stopped at a small stall to have brinjal pakoras and I happened to mention to Mr.Malay Mukherjee that we were lookinhg forward to seeing some bengaliculture while we were there. And he infact invited us to a rehearsal which was to happen in his house that day! Boy were we lucky!
Only Shruti was unwell so we had to see if she d be well enough to go. When we returned to dishari she had gone to the doctor but since she was …

Shruti had fallen ill, so she had to stay back at Dishari (our accommodation). I and shailee left to meet our escort at Nishtha. Fortunately we found him on the way itself. We were also accompanied by Mr.Moloy Mukherjee. He documents various projects for Nishtha and develops posters and pamphlets for them. Our first visit was to two schools in Baruipur, where Nishtha had taken up its Sanitation project. As part of the project they were building toilets in schools. They had also started a new project under the umbrella …

19th June
It was a fun day, we spent the entire day at the day boarding school. We had also finalised the projects we would be helping NISHTHA with. So, we quickly discussed our ideas and suggestions with Parshuram da and other teachers, and went to try the same in a class. We thought it would be helpful to teach pictorially and with lot of actions, as much as it was possible. We made the standard 6 kids enact the chapter “My family”. We picked up a girl and asked others …

18th June, 2009
We started early in the morning for Baruipur. NISHTHA had booked a guest house for us in Dhakuria, in south Calcutta. We were to drop our stuff there and take a local train to Baruipur. The guest house (Sona Guest house) was a typical city guest house mostly used by corporate houses for their clients/ employees - which in other words means air conditioners/ television sets in all the rooms. Not only was this place a little too far from Baruipur for daily travel, but a city guest …

17th june, 2009
We had been waiting and waiting and waiting for the train to reach Calcutta- 2 nights and 2 days in the train - the sweat and the stickiness and the heat, it seemed like a never-ending journey. We met a very varied bunch of folks in the train, most of who had gone to CMC,Vellore for medical checkups all the way from north-east . Our weekly express from Bangalore to Guwahati went via Chennai and Vellore To kill time and divert attention from the hotness of the …

It was a Sunday morning(I am not really sure what day it was but on a holiday all days are Sundays) and I was reading the newspaper, starting obviously with the sports column and then to the local news. There was a story on an NGO, Seva Sahyog, and the campaigns they had run to promote child education in the rural areas.I have written about their campaign in the previous blog. So what is the purpose of this blog- well, Keki and Sonali had mentioned that as part of the …

Firstly, a big thank you to the Grassroutes team for finding an NGO like Nishtha so suited to our interests. We had expressed our desire to work on either prostitution or child education. That they found a work area combining both speaks volumes about the dedication of you guys at GR. Admittedly, going to Kolkata wasnt on my radar of expected places to go, but now I am so very excited (roshagullas…am a foodie yes!!) and not having been to either Bang or Kol..I am really looking forward to this …

We finally got to know about our NGO !
Organisation - Nishtha (Please go through the reports on the right side to know more about them.)
Location- Baruipur,West Bengal (Well, yours truly can do a decent job at speaking, reading and writing in Bengali )
Firstly All Hail Grassroutes team for finding this NGO for us.We wanted to work in child education,women empowerment related areas and were particularly inerested in prostitution in India.These guys somehow linked all these three areas ! I mean WoW !
A little background about our NGO - In …