Better Karma

How many times have you felt a desire to make a difference in someone's life, especially children who are living in oblivion about the progress of the world while you are abreast with more information than you could use. It pinches our hearts when we see such children wandering near the temples and hotels in India, who are struggling to put some grains in their stomach, while our children are happily moving their thumbs on an Ipod or a PS2, humming to some songs or playing some games.

Every year thousands of Indians make a trip to their motherland. Most of the time it's a pleasure trip and catching up with relatives. Imagine the difference you can make in a child's life or your neighboring school or community by contributing just 4 hrs of your vacation time and that too without having to miss out on catching up with your friends and relatives.

I hope that some voluntary organizations can put some effort and create a pattern of tasks that others can replicate. Tasks that are 4/8 hours long which can have a positive and constructive impact on their community, or school, or nearby slum and involves couple of individual per session. People from USA, UK and Australia who go to India, Bangladesh, Srilanka could sign up for such tasks. They can be given some preparation material which can assist them as to how they are going to contribute their 4/8 hours.

It may not be easy to break the tasks because disparate people may want to contribute and it would be difficult to align their tasks so as to creates a contiguous outcome or impression on the children or community that is being assisted/helped. While it may be easy to go and just give a casual talk to children, assimilating these 4 hrs talks/contributions given by different people into a 2 or 3 credit hour course may be difficult and needs some planning/coordination. This is where organizations like the Googles' and Infosys' of the world who have a philanthropic heart can step in and contribute some resources to create such a framework.

In India and Bangladesh, children from poorer section of the society, whose parents are, in most of the cases, uneducated, go to schools where the students to teacher ratio is 80:1. Assisting such children in doing their homework seems like a simple task yet comes with its own challenges. One day someone may go there and teach a particular method to solve a math problem and the next day someone else may teach a different method to solve the same problem, thus creating more confusion for the children.

One of the important factors that I have noted is, if a person is on vacation in India he/she may be less inclined to make such voluntary contributions. But if such voluntary activities are clubbed along with our friends or relatives, it makes a huge difference and people are motivated to contributing their vacation time becasue they will not miss out on there relatives. We should create small tasks that people can take up when they make a trip to India. A task small enough so as to not steal a lot of their precious vacation time but big enough to make an impact in some child's life or their community. Making a difference, One Trip at a Time.