New Blog

~ Santosh

Please visit my personal blog at http://sansri.weebly.com/


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Child Right

Sometimes cartoons can say much more than you think they can

Cartoons for Child Rights: "Education" (India)

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Video Watch - Sehat Clinic

~ Santosh

Acumen Fund fellow, Nadaa Taiyab, created this video about her investee, Medicine Shoppe. She spent about a year in Bombay where she set up 8 Sehat Clinics - health clinics and pharmacies in low-income urban areas.

This is a great example of an effective business model serving the base of the pyramid.

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News

~ Santosh

Hole in the Wall Education Ltd. (HiWEL) has joined hands with SOS Children's Village, the world's largest orphan and abandoned children charity, to provide Wikipedia for the Learning Stations in India and African countries.

More news at http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/news14.html

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Road Trip

~ Santosh

Click here for some pics from my weekend bike trip to Shimla..

now and again i long
to ride away
where not a soul has gone
but someplace none felt alone

now and again i long
to sneak away
from the crowd to wilds
seeking solace far and away

now and again i wonder
why i run away
is it for blissful solitude
or awful loneliness from which to hide away?

now and again i long
to ride away..



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Walking down the streets of broken dreams

~ Santosh

Click here for some pics from the City walk that Rashi, Raina and I took with Salaam Baalak Trust last weekend -

Here's my lame attempt at penning my thoughts after the walk -

As I walk down the roadway
Hopes pass by
I ask if
No one can or no one may?
And I ask how
Can I just walkaway?

As I walk down the roadway
I wonder how
In a skimpy pathway
One lives with a castle in the sky
And I ponder how
With a mountain in their view
One is cast away in the fateful plains

As I walk down the roadway
Hopes pass by
But I convince myself again
With a ceremonial pray
There must be a rainbow
A few miles away

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Reality Byte #1

If anyone ever asked me about how deep rooted the caste division is in our society, I’d say not much. From what I see and have seen, I’ve never really experienced or seen any discrimination because of one’s caste. I realize that of course it does exist. You hear about it in the news, read about it in the paper, and of course hear stories from others. Despite all this, for some reason I figured they were these one-off incidences. A little naïve I guess but my experiences made me think along those lines.

So I was quite taken aback when I heard a story from a fellow colleague about something he encountered. He had gone to some village in Rajasthan to shoot a video. The people there were divided between two caste lines: Rajputs and ST/SC. When he went to the primary government school there he noticed that the plates (used for lunch) in the school were etched with either ‘Rajput’ or ‘ST/SC’. This helped distinguish the plates the Rajput children would eat out of and the plates ST/SC children would eat out of. Even though all the children went to the same school, it was absolutely unacceptable that the Rajput kids eat off the same plate that the day before an ST/SC kid could’ve eaten out of! I was quite astonished to hear this.

This was a story of just one school in one village. Multiply that by the number of schools and villages in the country and you realize the number of children being taught about their superiority or inferiority over another. It is a feeling, a concept, a value ingrained in them from the day they are born. How then do you tell them when say they’re 20 that everything they’ve been taught along caste lines is wrong? How then do you get a common man to fight against an injustice they have pretty much been ingrained to accept?

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