Aim for Seva in Rishikesh

I had a great opportunity to visit Rishikesh this week for AIM for Seva activities. There is a girls hostel in Rishikesh currently that operates out of a rented space. Last year, a very generous donor from Seattle, Mr Shyam Oberoi, decided to sponsor the building of a brand new hostel so that that girls can have a permanent space which can also accommodate more girls. I was joined on this trip by Mr. Oberoi’s son, Rajat, and his daughter-in-law, Nidhi, plus some of our other family members from India.

The purpose of my visit was to first visit the girls in their space and also to do the inaugural pooja for their new space which is almost ready to move-in. Also, as a bonus, I got to visit Pujya Swamiji’s ashram in Rishikesh and see Swamiji’s maha-samadhi.

The current Chatralaya has about 15 girls who go to a local private English medium school. They greeted us with a beautiful welcome song in English.

The girls ranging in age from 8 to 16 are super excited about learning. So many of them have math as their favorite subject. So many of them dream of becoming doctors or teachers. Here is a picture of the girls with all the visitors, their warden, their chef, and Swami Hamsananda who runs several AIM for Seva hostels in North India.

                                    

Here are some pictures of the new space for the girls — sponsored by our Seattle donors — a three story building which can accommodate about 50 girls moving forward. The building is almost ready and the girls will be moving here by mid-November.

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To inaugurate this new space, we participated in a traditional Pooja ceremony. There was a Ganesh pooja followed by a Navagraha Homam. Here are some pictures of that ceremony.

 

                     

The Pooja was followed by an unveiling of the plaque commemorating the main donor.

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It was an emotional and eventful visit and we came back re-energized about AIM for Seva. After meeting the girls, we are even more convinced about enabling underprivileged children to get a good education and get them out of the poverty trap.

My faith in the efforts of AIM for Seva were enhanced further after meeting Swami Hamsananda. He has dedicated his entire life’s work to AIM for Seva! He loves the children in the various hostels that he supports as his own kids and the kids in turn adore and respect him tremendously. His warmth and caring is infectious and after meeting him I felt so confident that AIM for Seva is in such great hands! Here is a picture of Swamiji with me and Rajat and Nidhi.

Finally, the bonus part of my trip was visiting Swami Dayananda Ashram in Rishikesh, on a beautiful location by the Ganga, and getting a chance to see Pujya Swamiji's Mahasamadhi!

  

Learn more about AIM for Seva.

Donate to the Seattle chapter to help us continue these efforts. 

Shankar Mahadevan's Concert for a Cause

In my last blog, I talked about my involvement with Aim for Seva -- an NGO that is helping transform rural education in India. Every year, we have been organizing fundraising concerts where we feature amazing cultural performances by famous artists from India.

This year, Aim for Seva is going big! We are very excited to bring famous Bollywood singer, Shankar Mahadevan, to Seattle plus 5 other US cities.

Shankar's show is called "Krishna Sabrang" and he will be singing songs in several Indian languages and several different styles ranging from Indian Classical to Rock Fusion.  He will be accompanied by his sons, Siddarth and Shivam.

The Seattle event will also include an awesome preshow featuring some local children and an a' capella team from University of Washington.

I am very excited about this show and we have a dedicated team of volunteers working hard to put together a fantastic event for the benefit of the kids in India.

Please come to the event and show your support for Aim for Seva to help change rural education in India. Tickets are selling fast, so buy yours now!

Aim for Seva - Solving Rural Education in India

I recently got involved in Aim for Seva -- an amazing non-profit organization dedicated to helping educate underprivileged rural children in India.

The problem of rural education is that schools are too far for many kids to get to and so they cannot get the education they deserve. Drop out rates are well over 50%.

The concept of Aim for Seva is very simple. We build free student homes or chatralayas near existing schools and recruit children to stay at there while pursuing their education. We pay for their tuition, boarding, and lodging. Drop out rates drop to under 10% and amazing opportunities open up for these children.

The concept works! It is scale-able and has been proven for almost 17 years now. There are almost 100 hostels all over India. For the geeks among us, here are some stats:

We raise money to build and run these chatralayas from donors like you and I all over the world and there is a team of dedicated volunteers and employees on the ground in India to run the operations.

Here is a picture of my recent site visit to one of these chatralayas near Hyderabad.

Learn more about Aim for Seva at www.aimforseva.org
To donate or participate in our USA-based initiatives, please visit: www.aimforsevausa.org

IITK 87 Reunion - Just Nod if You Can Hear Me

Twenty nine years ago many stars aligned and a bunch of us come into IIT Kanpur together.  We came from all parts of India with immensely diverse backgrounds -- united only by our intelligence and by our aspirations to create great lives for us and those around us.  In the beginning we bonded naturally and comfortably with people who were assigned rooms around us -- our wing-mates. We mostly accepted each other as ourselves and sowed the seeds of some of our best friendships in life.

At IITK, we went through 4 of our most formative years of life -- we all turned from adolescents to adults while here. We sometimes thrived and sometimes struggled with academics and extra-curricular activities -- but one important thing that we all did was we created bonds and memories!

We left our college, ready to take on the world, vowing to stay in touch with our best friends.

Over the years, we scaled all kinds of mountains  in our lives -- one higher than the other. We built families, we built homes, and we all built super-successful lives. And we stayed in touch with some of our friends over the years.

Then came the 25th year reunion -- where those bonds and memories were reignited! We all converged on the campus with a little apprehension and much excitement. We felt butterflies in our stomachs as we first sighted the IITk campus.  Nostalgia took over when we saw the familiar roads and buildings. Not much looks to have changed, we realized, as we started recognizing the comfortable landmarks and well-trodden paths.

Then we started meeting our friends and batchmates! We shrieked in excitement as we met friends we made 25 years ago, but had not seen since then. We gave puzzled looks to people who we could barely recognize. We pondered over how some people managed to look exactly the same after that many years. Apprehension gave way to comfortable familiarity -- you were still welcomed and accepted into the tribe even after all the time that had passed.

We all took nostalgic tours of the campus, we visited the buildings where we attended our classes or worked on our projects. We tried to re-live our college days through extended "bulla" sessions or by visiting our favorite haunts at the odd hours of yesteryears --Lala's canteen at 2:30am. We met current IITK students and we gave them our words of wisdom about life.

Some of us decided to pull together an impromptu band with some guitars, keyboards, and a drum set. We played a set with some of our favorite IITK songs of those days -- such as Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb or Pyaar Hamen Kis Mod Pe from the movie Satte pe Satta. The non-band members among us visited the memory lane by participating in the singing  and thoroughly encouraging the band. All of us really enjoyed Rajesh Nigam's amazing extempore performance to cap off one of the most amazing evening of our lives!

While the place that brought us together was IIT Kanpur and the time was late 1980's, it felt that forces larger than ourselves brought us together. At the end of the day, the reunion was less about the place and time but was almost entirely about people and about memories of an awesome part of our lives spent with those people. And,  the people who could not make it to reunion were sorely missed.

At the end of 3 days, we all left feeling much enhanced about our bonds with our tribe. We all left with a renewed appreciation of the place that brought us together. We all left richer with memories of the event that we will cherish for many years to come.

P.s. Thanks to Tarun Bhargava, Naveen Prakash, Jai Rawat, the IITK Alumni Association and many others who helped put this amazing event together.