A Visit to Chiranjeev- 6th August 2009

6th August 2009

Hello friends...
Today was a different day for me...(kyu? dekhte hai aage...)
Slept at 3am last night.
But woke up early today morning. (Woke up at 9:30am!!!) Thanks to my childhood friend, Abhimanyu.
I completed the daily morning activities and went to canteen to have that "nashili" tea with some healthy breakfast.
Then we came back to the room and I switched on my laptop, plugged the evdo, connected it to server, opened the browser, punched in the web address (www.jagteraho.co.in) and dammmm.....
The server went down for the next 1 hour...

Pankaj came to the room at 10 and he told me about Chiranjeev.
Chiranjeev is an NGO which runs in M.G.Science institute. The mission of the NGO is to teach the poor children whose parents cannot afford tuition classes (for more details about it contact Pankaj Pal).
He told me that the condition of this NGO was bad these days. It needed some help. So we decide to visit it today in the evening.

Then Pankaj went to the college to pay his annual fees. And Nikunj came to the room. Luckily now I was able to connect to the internet through the EVDO. Now it was time to do some official work. So started with the current project of Surgistar. I and Nikunj did the work till it was lunch time. I saw the time and said "Lunch Time"(this reminds me of the days when we worked in einfochips on their website www.einfochips.com. As the clock ticked 1 o'clock Nirav, the marketing head of Einfochips, used to say "Lunch time guys". I really miss those days.)
So again we went to our famous Canteen and had fried rice with "Nikunj's Dhaba". Pankaj also joined us at the canteen with "Pankaj's Dhaba. We completed the lunch. I and Nikunj returned back to the room. After having lunch an afternoon nap was necessary. I woke up with Pankaj's sms "Come to Nescafe". We went to Nescafe and there we met Zeal who was coming with us to Chiranjeev. As per the planning we went to Chiranjeev. It was deep inside the campus of CEPT University. On entering the class room I saw around 11-12 kids of different grades and 2 volunteers doing their best to teach them.
I saw a boy, sitting in a corner of the class and reading the chapter on Kiran Bedi of English Textbook of 9th Standard. I sat beside him to help him. To explain him I had to translate all the difficult words in Gujarati. (Believe me. This is really a difficult task if the subject is English. Once I had done such translation in 12th starting. I had translated the first 2 chapters, Point and Line, of Maths-1. We did not get any text books of English medium in the first few months of 12th. We only had one Maths-1 text book, that too of Gujarati Medium. So I used to translate all the questions in the exercise. That was easy because it was Maths. But to give exact Gujarati synonyms to a 9th standard guy, studying in Gujarati Medium is really a tough job.)
I also met a girl who was in studying in 6th standard. She was struggling to remember the spelling of “Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen.” Reason: The technique to teach the spellings was wrong. They were just given the spellings of 1 to 50 and were told to memorize them. I tried to help her out by breaking the spelling into parts. This proved a bit helpful to her.
I also met another girl from 6th standard. I asked her the tables (ghadiyo) of 5, 7 and 8. She started and completed it without a single pause. But on asking “What is Baavan (52)?” No answer. The reason behind this was: the volunteers told them to mug up the tables written in their books. They never taught them.

Our main aim for visiting this was to help Chiranjeev. And by seeing all this I am really eager to do something which would be beneficial to these kids. In this 1 hour visit we noted all the weak points and the areas which needed improvements. Then we went to CEPT campus and sat there under the trees and discussed what all can be done to help Chiranjeev. And with a strong determination and huge sets of ideas we “called it a day”.

This was what made my day different from the other days.
Those who read this and are willing to help Chiranjeev, contact me or Pankaj.

Ok, guys now it’s time to check mails so I will end it up here…

Thank You.