And it goes on till forever…
Till forever turns into yesterday…
Why do all good things come to an end…that’s a funny song by Nelly Furtado, but it’s been one of my faves nevertheless. Unfortunately it’s chorus has had many instances of manifesting itself in reality in the past few days and I may start disliking the song itself pretty soon.
It was the last day of the trip, and my brain had still not grasped this fact. It remained a fact and not a realization. While going back to the station, in …

REPAINT THE OLD STROKES
It was time for the kids to repaint their school and hence those empty racks.

HERE WE ARE
The curriculum helps them analyze everything first hand in the best way with the limited resources they have. A snap shot from the Geography class at Bala Mitra.

THE MOURYA’s
Pointing at the vast Mouryan empire during times of Ashoka the great.

A SHINE
The Waldorf mode of education is a practice rarely found in the Indian sub-continent. It provides the children with a stress-free learning environment, where they are given the choice to …

Mr. Vasu came at eight fifteen in the morning to take us to the slum he spoke of the previous  day. It was a twenty minute drive in an automatic rickshaw from one of the most expensive areas to the most pathetic of slums. The slum was recognized by the government for the fact that it has been in the place for over a two decades. It is in the ununsed railway lands near the station. This area has a railway track on one side with abandoned quarters that …

This lady kondamma made Awesome tea for us on the Chula. While krushi was trying to capture the pics she said ,“ just don’t leave it here after taking the pics..make sure we get gas stoves from the govt”. She later told us how difficult it is to cook during rainy season as the timber would be wet most of the times. Sometimes the tribals have to go without cooking because of this.

Surprisingly her name too was kondamma. She has to trek 10kms to and fro to get water …

We got back to Vizag the previous day and had a talk with Susheela ma’am about what could     be done at the school. We were picked up at 8:30 in the morning and we were ready with the equipment by then. This time at school, a lot more kids were present than before and their classes have just started. Curious Varsha wanted to enter the class that very moment but we thought its better take some permission as it would be disturbing the class. We were happily invited to …

When we were sitting on a table waiting for the Dwakra women to come and join us, this  beautiful girl silently stood behind us posing for a pic. When I asked her to sit with us on the  bench, she was reluctant. She would just stand there and shy away. For almost 30 minutes I  became a clown for her, trying to make her laugh. Told her something about myself  expecting that she would say something about herself too. But she  didn’t say a word. When I just stopped …

It was day 6… which means our tribal experiences are gettin to an end
We were accompanied by Rekha, a volunteer from Adivasimitra as well as a couple of their  project coordinators to Gonduru, a village less than ten kilometres from Paderu where we  were staying. Though the place was not far, and the journey was not uneventful (can it ever  be!), but it took us sometime, since the village was uphill, and the bus was apsrtc.
Gonduru is one of these cute lil villages tucked away in the …

Day 4 of Roadtrip about to rockkk !!!

The stop’s a shandy some 5 kms away from araku. Here’s the first chap who had the time to talk to us about the problems that tribal sellers faced. Yeahh! It was that busy !

Can you guess what this is? I’m sure you can’t and no, it’s not leather. It’s mango jelly that was being sold in large quantities in the market. One roll of the above takes about 50 mangoes to be made.

Immersed in the ‘grass routes’ experience. It takes no …

We had to leave for a village 15kms away from Dumbriguda at 6:30 in the morning to see  how the “Grain Bank ” system works. Though we set an alarm for five, we all ended getting  up much before that. We had a disturbed sleep, probably because of the “king-size” bed and  the “mosquito-treat”. We were too scared to go out, it was pitch dark outside. Yes, this so-  called town doesn’t even have a single street light, so in the mean while we did some editing  and deleting-junk …

Road Trip Diaries - Day 4
Another unexpected twist in the story on Day 4 was when Mr. David asked us to leave for Dumbriguda a village near Araku, where one of Samata’s partners was active. We asked him an hour more to complete the report work we had and then were accompanied to the center of Araku from where we had to find some transport to the village. No private transport was ready to come to the place then for some reason and the only option left was an APSRTC …