'Man'ager of the Masses

He hurtles down the pot-holed roads on a fat bike and heads turn. He baritones into a microphone and an auditorium full of women reacts with delight. He flashes a grin and people fall all over themselves to do his bidding. He is young and dashing. Pop singer? Macho man? Casanova? Corporate honcho?

Meet Gaurav Joshi. The dirt roads that he races down are that of Indore in Madhya Pradesh. The women are the slum-dwellers of the small city. And he is the Programme Officer at the NGO, the curiously abbreviated CECOEDECON, which works with women in slums. And Gaurav barely has time to stop and take stock of the waves of admiration and compliance in his wake as he zooms from one task to another errand.

And he works in a State where nearly 40 per cent of the urban population, comprising six million people, lives below the poverty line. A whopping 2.4 million people live in slums, a figure that even officials admit is far below the actual statistics. The Human Development Index ranks Madhya Pradesh as 28th in India, way down the table. About 40 per cent of Indore's population lives in slums and half the children in the slums are born at home.

Gaurav is a social worker by profession. An M Phil in Social Work from Delhi University, he came back to his hometown to work with a slum health project. His area of operations is about 50 slums spread across the rapidly growing city. His constituency: about 3000 women who work variously as maids, labourers, rag pickers and sanitation staff. His mandate: To ensure that the women organize themselves and implement a calendar of ante-natal care and immunization for pregnant women and their children. His brief: Ensure the cooperation among the women goes beyond health and disentangles the myriad problems they face living in such degraded conditions.

What’s so special about him? “Nothing special! Except that I am in a profession that is yet to be recognized as one. I think that is what we need now, people taking up social project management as a serious, academic discipline and training. That’d make implementation of development schemes so much more efficacious,” he says. And isn’t politics another such avenue? “Yes, that too, though I am not thinking about it right now.”

People are the driving force behind Gaurav Joshi. “Whatever I do, I want to work with people. They inspire me, they motivate me. I am exhilarated when I am with people,” he says. As it is evident from his unbounded enthusiasm and the willing participation of the women in the mammoth urban health event he is anchoring. The exhaustion darkening his face cannot dampen his spirits as he implores the gathering to do just one more slogan.

“I try to be as sincere as possible in my work. It seems futile to even have projects like this unless we put in some dedicated efforts to make it happen. It is all scientific, plugging gaps, identifying strengths and shoring up leaders. And then they, the people, will take care of it.”

It is a heartening imagery that Gaurav features in. A growing city in India, slums waking up to better infrastructure, supportive, aware men, confident, smart women, happy, healthy children who may yet see the black of a board in some school soon.

Sheer drive, unerring instincts, ability to build up rapport with and crack the toughest of nuts, hardened in the miserable slum scenario, steely grit sheathed in petals! And an unadulterated, streamlined, spiral-bound dream for tomorrow!

– Meet Gaurav Joshi, the ultra savvy, true-blue, ivy league professional in a social worker’s khadi wrapping. All set to change things wherever he is. He is, indeed, worth writing a blog about.

Koi Lauta De...

That evening in Hyderabad, a baby gurgled somewhere. A woman painted her eyes carefully with kajal, looking into the mirror. She must’ve gazed into the eyes of her absent lover, somewhere in the city, and awaited him with longing. A jasmine gajra bloomed in the seller’s basket on the street corner. A birthday cake glowed in its candlelight. A dog woofed for his master. A song came and went in waves in the slow breeze. And the moon waited. They had time. Before they knew.

A man, a woman, a child. Men, women and children. It is a tragic irony that they were trying to have fun. They probably rebelled mutely against the daily humdrum and tried to have fun. They laughed and chatted. They teased and mused. They watched and wandered. Until they died. They had no time. They never knew.

Getting shocked at bomb blasts is passé. It is just news. Until one steps on the first sticky patch of someone else’s blood. Until one sees gory figures lying prone in undignified heaps. And, masses of flesh, shapeless, bloody and anonymous.

It is not the violence that strikes me most about the bomb blasts. It is the suddenness. The abrupt way in which it snuffs out lives. The swiftness with which it seals our lips, our minds and our fates.

Shouldn’t we have a right to know when we are going to end? After all, there would be goodbyes to be said. There is the warmth of the flesh that we want to leave behind, in the closed fists of our loved ones. There are the apologies we want to make, for the small and the big hurts we caused…since there is no time to make amends. There is the little sweet nothing we wanted to whisper before both sound and sweetness were snatched from us.

For us news folks, bomb blasts are just about the toll, the blood and the destruction. They are about terrorists and police. About conspiracies and security failures. But that is not what goes missing in the melee.

It is about life shattered. It is about the candles on the cake blown out. It is about the jasmines that are reduced to dry, bitter crumbles. It is about the child’s cry in the middle of the night for its missing father. It is about the headless, lifeless body that lies alone, orphaned, anonymous in the hospital lobby. Until, a shell-shocked someone turns it into a person. It is about individual lives, changed forever.

I stood in the hospital lobby where shock made the scene a bizarre stilllife. Even as hundreds milled around, there was some kind of stillness, muffled like there is cotton wool all around and people struggled to move through it. I looked at the stricken faces all around and the bloodied bodies lying around. And I knew.

That bomb blasts are not about terror. We can live with terror. We did. We do. We will, too. We get used to taking the shadow of fear with us, wherever we went and not mind it. We can tuck fear into the folds of our mind and cover it with layers of colourful gaiety and everyday life.

Bomb blasts are about moments lost between people, separated brutally at that split second. Bomb blasts are about what cannot be avenged. What cannot be grown back. And what cannot be explained.

How does one find retribution for the dark kaajal that melts with tears and leaves behind the waiting in those young eyes? For a lifetime to come!