Ripples on the brain

First of all, thanks a lot to the ISB management for heeding to our request for providing “real” flood lights in the volley ball court. We created history at ISB tonight for being the first set of players to play volley ball under flood lights.

I used to play volley ball from my 12th standard when I had many class mates who were in the volley school team. Then we had a well-maintained court back in CPWD quarters Besant Nagar where I used to stay during my KV IIT days. I enjoyed playing the game so much and though I am still very amateurish even after playing the game for the last 8 years, I accept it as a lack of ability and give it whatever I can. I have been like that in almost all the games I play. I am good in the sense I pick up any game fast and I guess my body is very flexible and I don’t improve upon it after sometime.

Back in IRTT, we had a good team of volley players and used to play every evening in the final year before we switched to cricket. At ISB, I was so thrilled to find a volley court and a set of players who are fun to play with. As I had mentioned in one of my other posts, I love volley ball like nothing else at ISB; this even if I mostly end up on the losing side. Volley ball is going to be the most missed activity for me post ISB…

Ok, so another term ends and I have a sort of a mini break. Actually this time the break is only for two days as I have Macroeconomics & Policy Instruments on Saturday and Sunday. And that is also the reason I’m not on Charminar Express right now (to home). I’ve lot of things to do/submit these two days that I don’t think even those days can be called breaks.

I’m pretty excited with another thing that I am working on right now. There’s a competition called the GSVC (Global Social Venture Competition) in which I am planning to participate with my team. Initially I wasn’t interested in it, but when I learnt that somebody was working on Learning Disability (LD), I made my decision to join the team. That was 3 weeks ago. We got a few acquaintances in Hyderabad, a psychologist, an entrepreneur doctor, his subordinate and a few others. We started off wanting to do something for LD in Hyderabad. Initially we thought we will talk to all the schools here, make them aware of this problem if they’re not already, get them to commit certain teachers from their school who can work on this (help their school students who have some form of LD) and establish links between the schools so that they interact and make this model work.

It was a hazy plan, but good enough to start somewhere. By accident we met one Ms. Gauri Reddy, a psychologist (I think), who was interested in this. Apparently, she has also been trying to get something started for LD in Hyderabad and had not been successful so far. She gave us some thoughts that took us away from our intial plan. She told us that schools will not be interested in either committing their teachers’ time or in getting them an additional qualification because the teachers don’t have the time to even complete the syllabus for the year and moreover, they will always be apprehensive that the teachers will move out if they get any additional qualification. She also said that she’d encouraged some teachers from the city schools to get trained in LD (teaching LD students requires some special training), but they were all fragmented now and hence, she wanted to us to open a centre so that she could bring all of them together and do something. The centre will mainly do three kinds of activities - 1. Assess children and find out if they have the disorder through counsellors, 2. Train school teachers from time-to-time and encourage them set up such centres at their school and 3. Help out students with LD with some additional training through the voluntary teachers who will devote some time to the centre. Now we hadn’t thought about this at all. This was a huge investment for us in terms of time.

But after that meeting, we were convinced that this was probably the way to go. We then met Dr.Niraj from the MedRc who specializes in making digital education materials (I can talk a lot about this man, but I’ll reserve that for my next post). He said he’ll also help us in some way if we start a centre. It was a coincidence that MedRc conducted an awareness session for the city school teachers on the 19th of this month. We were invited to that session and were asked to make a presentation “to set the tone” (as Dr.Niraj’s subordinate, Ms. Surekha put it). One of my team members, Anita, made that presentation and we used that session to collect some information as to what the teachers think should be done. We asked them, through a survey, if they think a new centre in Hyderabad for LD will be useful and assuming one is started, if they’ll be able to provide some help.

We will be collecting the survey results sometime this week to know how many of the teachers are interested in such a centre and in helping us out. We need to really think about what we will be doing next. The more I think about it, the more I get confused as to what to do! If the teachers have been positive about their help, should we work on starting the centre? We plan to get some corporate sponsorship intially as seed capital. For that we need to register the centre (at least that’s what my friend tells me). Assuming we get some corporate sponsorship (we haven’t worked on that so far), do we start a new centre or do we ask one of the centres in Chennai, the Alpha-to-Omega, which I’m told does a phenomenal work in LD there, to open a centre here assuring them of our intial support? Dr. Gauri Reddy is positive that she’ll have some resources to man the centre initially until we get some professional and regularly start training teachers. Do we go ahead with her assurance? Things will probably become clearer this week .

The main complaint I have had about Diwali since I was a kid is that it is too short for a festival, when compared to festivals like Navarathiri. The hype is created atleast a month earlier with the colourful ads on TV and newspapers that you start looking forward to it with so much expectations. And the day comes and goes in a jiffy.

This year’s Diwali was no different. All through my stay at ISB so far, whenever I used to walk in the lawns or the Rec Centre or other facilities, I used to think about what I’ll tell my parents about it when they visit ISB. These were some of the comments I had thought - Volleyball court: “This is where I spend the best part of my evenings and my happiest times”, Khemkha: “Important events take place here, the acoustics is so good, Classrooms: “Look at the gadgets we have here, the Prof. has almost anything he needs (especially since my mom is a teacher, she was interested in seeing our class rooms)” so on and so forth.

And so we decided that this Diwali was probably the right time for them to come over since my schedule can only get busier from now on with the placement season about to begin. They came here the night before Diwali (the rains and the accident in Secunderabad 2 days earlier had ensured that they travelled 25 hours for journey that should have taken them just 14 hours) and saw for themselves what it was like to stay here. They liked some facilities, disliked somethings here, but overall they were very happy. I couldn’t show them a lot of things here - the classrooms, Rec Centre as they were too tired the first day and on the Diwali day, we had other things lined up (there was a music programme in which I sang) and the next day (that is today), they had to book their tickets again as the train in which they were supposed to travel was cancelled. I guess things never happen the way you plan them and you need to live with it. But on the whole, I enjoyed this Diwali thoroughly. So much so that today after I saw them off, I dread to go back to my room to be all alone all over again. Last week, one of my friends was in a similar situation when her parents had just left. She told me that she felt so bad after they left. I know what she meant now.