What does it take to educate a Child?

The tagline of Shiksha Campaign says, "Padhega India...Badhega India". Very simply it means, education is so much of a necessity in these times for an individual and for a country to grow and prosper. And I am sure I don't need to write why?

Few weeks back I had gone to a Pakkakheda Village, Karnal, some 150 kms or 2.5 hours car drive from Delhi. Suddenly, you are in a world, which is in complete contrast to what we experience in metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai etc or even Tier-II cities like Pune, Chandigarh etc. Electricity comes every alternate day, people are reluctant to send their girl child to near by schools, people marry off their daughters at an age of 13-15 years. To fight against such a mindset at their ages is one hell of a task. Probably to an extent it is even out of our hands. But our future is certainly in our hands and if we make a choice, we can shape it as we want it to be.

By educating our future generation we can atleast prevent such thoughts from entering into these innocent minds. There are a number of people across the country who are working at providing free education to children, several NGOs in cooperation with government are running several programs to help fecilitate the same.

We, at Sarthak Prayas are also trying to spread this movement. In the same village I mentioned earlier, we are now running a school, "Divya Sanskar" providing free education to 250 students from nursery to X. This is just a start, our aim is to help any child study well till graduation. It is the basic right of every individual and all of us can help these innocent little children to gain access to the best of what world can offer.

In one of the recent seminars, Harsh said that all we need to do is cut down on one single outing to a restaurant in a year, buy one shirt less or not watch one movie in theatre in a year and with that money we can help a child study, we can bring a smile to someone's face and we can help shape our future. As I always say in my workshops on environment, The Choice is Yours!!!

I will log off with this thought, " Sometimes you got to create what you want to be part of. Those are the very moments when you create your destiny."

By the way i-pod has switched on a wonderful song, " jab hawaein sunati hai tere mere pyaar ki dastan ,sunati hai ye fiza, sunati hai ye zameen , sunata hai aasmaan........isiliye phoolon mein kaliyon mein khushboo hai, isliye parvaton jharno mein jaado hai, isliye nikhre hain..raadte vaadiyan" from Luck By Chance. Enjoy!