The memory still lingers in my head. “What motivates you to do what you do,” I remember asking a teacher of mine on the last day of mine in seventh standard. With a sweet smile she replied, “Akash, the answer cannot be said in words. You have to experience it.”
Today I can proudly say that I know the answer to the question.
After spending over a month with 25 girls, each one as different from the other like the sky and the earth, I know what it feels to have touched others lives. I know now, why since ancient times, being a teacher is considered to be such a sacred profession. I know how spreading the light of knowledge can make the world a brighter place
Over the course of SHE Creates, we went through everything a teacher would go through with a student. There were bouts of anger. There were times we had to be strict and keep our foot down. There were moments of encouragement. I will never forget the time Rahul and I speaking sense into the Bombay Cambridge girls.
And how can I forget teacher’s day? When I went on to perform my mentoring duties to Apne Aap, the girls had actually prepared a small dance for me. At that moment, I could hear my teacher’s voice in my head, “You have to experience it.”
In an earlier blog entry, Madhusudan has written, “What are we getting out of all this?” I think we all know what each one of us got.
In the entire team of SHE Creates, I can proclaim myself to have been the first person to have met all the 25 girls. They were shy. They were nervous. They afraid to speak. But most importantly, they were curious. After my interview with Uncle’s Coaching Classes, I was packing the GL2 camera, when little Nazmeen, tugged at my sleeves and inquired, “Humein bhi yehi camera milne waala hain? “Are we getting this camera?”
I think that moment made me realize that it was going to be worth an effort. And 40 days later, there is no doubt about that. The same girls, who were stammering in front of my camera, were giving interviews on radio shows and TV channels.
And even as the curtains are drawn over this beautiful event, the pondering never seizes.
There is a saying in the Talmud, a holy book of the Jews, which when translated into English, roughly means, “Whoever changes one life. Changes the world entire.”
You do the math.
