An update on recent times

20th September 2008

Last weekend we were getting ready to celebrate my mom’s birthday when we were shocked to turn on the news and hear about a series of terrorist bomb blasts that had just occurred across Delhi – two of them just outside our home, in a market I walk through almost every day. Thankfully we were all safe, but it brought a lot closer to home the loss and violence that many in this country are experiencing more and more each day – with terrorist attacks, killing of Christians, violence between religious groups now becoming daily occurrences. It’s moments like this that make me pause from the routine, and reflect on the many troubling issues affecting our world, and on how my own life fits into that picture – on how my life can count towards making even a tiny difference in that picture.

I started off this year lying on a beach in Goa asking this very question, with no idea where in the world I was headed next, but waiting on God with these verses in mind: "God, my shepherd! I don't need a thing. You have bedded me down in lush meadows, you find me quiet pools to drink from. True to your word, you let me catch my breath, and send me in the right direction" (Psalm 23, The Message) True to His word, God let me catch my breath just long enough to plummet me into an adventure way beyond what I could ask or imagine. I am now doing exactly what I love and in exactly the right place to be able to do it…mixing with all the top players in the education field in India, from policymakers to grassroots practitioners, and strategizing with some incredible people about how to bring a transformation in the quality of education available for India's majority poor, from a system that is textbook-driven and rote-oriented and oppressive, to one that actually allows students to enjoy learning and understand and explore and think for themselves.

It's been 5 months since I moved to New Delhi and started my job as an education consultant to the government's Ministry of Ed, in order to improve the quality of government schools across India. Over the last 5 months, I've had the chance to help appraise the annual education budgets of half the states of India, to sit in on high-level meetings of all the top-level educational policymakers of India, to have fascinating conversations with some of India's top educational academics and practitioners, to give training seminars to large groups of teacher trainers, to travel to various parts of India to see what's going on in education and how it can be improved. It's been an incredible and overwhelming experience of trying to bring seeds of change in a system that is huge and complex and bureaucratic and resistant to change. But it's also been fun…sitting in an office where I'm surrounded by 50-year-old Hindi-speaking bureaucrats, having people twice my age reporting to me, being treated like some big dignitary when I visit rural schools where I'm gifted with coconuts and shawls!

Besides my day job, I am also still closely involved in helping manage the school started by my grandfather in Pune to provide high quality education to underprivileged children (www.gyanankur.com). It's been an exciting yet challenging journey as we struggle through the birthing pains of any pioneering project…so much need, vision and potential but not enough people, resources, energy or hours in the day to accommodate all of it! Our village school in Kesnand village is rapidly growing since good education is very highly sought after but is almost never an option for the poor. We are now literally bursting at the seams with 250 children and not enough room to fit them all! A few months ago a wealthy businessman spontaneously offered us a brand-new 30-classroom school building at another location in Pune where he asked us to run another high quality school for the poor! So God has been growing our project faster than we can keep up, and we are desperately praying for more land, more funds and child sponsorships, and more people to come help us so that we can keep up and reach all the children that are right at our doorstep and wanting to come to school!

The more I interact with educators across India, the more I realize that the root problems in Indian society lie deeper, in some of the underlying mindsets and values and worldviews of this society – such as the low status of children, the low status of women and consequently teachers, the caste mindset that doesn’t see every child as equal, the lack of responsibility for children other than one’s own, a belief in social inequality as ordained by karma and needing to be accepted, etc. I see more and more that these are the things that are obstructing true educational transformation in Indian society – and that what is needed is a worldview transformation in Indian society. So on the side I have been involved in several research and writing projects, teacher training programs, etc. to explore these issues.

But between all these commitments and the adjustments of trying to settle in to life in a new city, it can get a bit overwhelming at times (at least it helps immensely that I'm living with my lovely family who also moved here 5 months ago). I sometimes feel like I somehow aged about 10 years over the last 10 months!…I get these moments where I find myself sitting somewhere and just asking myself, "how the heck did I get here??" – at least several times a week! It helps to remember that God is the one who opens doors and gives opportunities as well as the strength and wisdom required to face them, that all I need to do is focus on loving God and my neighbour and just stumble into the next thing He leads me to each day, and that as Gandhi put it, "Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."