Thoughts on the 10th year of AID
The below was written by Ravi Kuchumanchi who is the founder of AID (http://www.aidindia.org) Its an organization that works on the grassroots development of India and is headed by professionals who have quit lucrative corporate and research jobs to reply to their calling |
Dear Friends, I have been thinking of writing something on the fact that AID is ten years old, but nothing seems to come to mind because of all the action that's going on that leaves pale any general article or poem or speech. Which is good because one of the goals of AID during its forming years was to induce people to act not just talk or write and now its difficult to talk! Nevertheless I am attempting something on the 10-year anniversary of a committed volunteer group I have known since its birth and I also do not know in many ways. ![]() The other achievement is that we have participated on all issues we could lay our hands on. Being a group of diaspora and having this kind of intense involvement in so many areas to do with rural development means that many will approach us for support and solidarity assuming we will understand them more deeply and can collaborate in more involved and intense manner. Moving from CSH to CSH discussing a school somewhere, and then the following week having saathis who work on watershed work in hilly regions and then coming up with action ideas as a part of an agitation for human rights against destructive development, and then working to form a partnership for a movement for savings, micro-credit and health in several blocks of India is happening at a breathtaking pace in AID. Will this breadth and depth of knowledge in people who are primarily located thousands of miles away from the intended field of actual action have a utilatarian value? Will it be useful for the few who return to India to work fulltime so that their time is better spent in villages where everyone of these issues exists? Will the many who remain in the U.S. who have become aware build informal solidarity groups and sub-groups within AID as well as seeking the involvement of other groups, for each and every issue of interest to link with people who have returned or already working in India thus giving much needed collaborative strength to a diverse wide-ranging number of NGOs, peoples movements, activists and social workers? It is all of this and more. We should be aware that our actions in wide-ranging areas will allow us to build lots of diverse partnerships in the years to come and we cannot exhaust ourselves with Narmada or HBP or the earthquake, but this kind of intensity of attention we need to give to many more things like drought, alternate energy, livelihoods, food-security, etc and lead by vision of various people and volunteers in AID and in India, who take up one thing or the other, support groups should crystallize so that there is greater force. Thus at the end of 10 years if some of us who have been with this organization for a longer time, may occassionally get the feeling of "is this all" that we have worked for and others are working for, it is because at those times we are redrawing the expectations from AID, where whatever it is doing we are taking for granted, and asking for progress beyond that. Looking at the enormity of problems we have to quickly realize that the solutions will have charecteristics that are "repeatable" coupled with being "innovative" in the first place, they will be "decentralized" that they will take root independently in many many places and in people's hearts while at the same time each one of them will have a mass base centred around the context and its own uniqueness of approach, and while giving tremendous satisfaction will require interactions that will frustrate us as the overall situation is gloomy...we have to stand through the thick and thin of all these contrasting experiences including "is this all"and "all this" and indeed any successful social worker not only works on break through things that raise the tempo and the excitement but also does lot of repetitive work on time-tested ideas and everyday routine things that have to be done. This is by no means an overall presentation or analysis of AID. Indeed I have missed out many things that currently are focus of AID volunteers thinking such as our own personal life-style changes and viewing inequalities not as a problem centred around the poor but around the rich. I have also missed pointing out the new and emerging volunteers of AID-India in various Indian cities. No doubt in the AID conference and beyond there will be detailed presentations and discussions On the 10th year of AID I feel our strength lies in our volunteers and we need to develop ourselves completely since this resource is needed by many causes and groups. A person who has been drawn to AID or to these causes and has survived through the organization for a year has already built up considerable useful experience that little more timeliness and "finishing the job" and non-postponement kind of approach on his/her part, whether it is in things like "I will recycle and not create so much trash everyday" or "I will build a deeper involvement with this project" or "I will write against that injustice" or in some cases "I will return to India" will get an exponentially greater number of things done. Anniversary of 10 years of AID is the anniversary of a million volunteer hours of AID. Ravi Kuchimanchi. |
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