|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
||
India just had a stunning election, with incumbents across the country thrown out, largely by rural voters. Clearly rural Indians, who make up the country's majority, were telling the cities and the government that they were not happy with the direction of events. I think I can explain what happened, but first I have to tell you about this wild typing race I recently had with an 8-year-old Indian girl at a village school. The Shanti Bhavan school sits on a once-scorpion-infested bluff about an hour's drive — and 10 centuries — from Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley. The students are all "untouchables," the lowest caste in India, who are not supposed to even get near Indians of a higher caste for fear they will pollute the air others breathe. The Shanti Bhavan school, with 160 students, was started by Abraham George, one of those brainy Indians who made it big in high-tech America. He came back to India with a single mission: to start a privately financed boarding school that would take India's most deprived children and prove that if you gave them access to the same technologies and education that have enabled other Indians to thrive in globalization, they could, too. I visited Mr. George's school in February, and he took me to a classroom where 8-year-old untouchables were learning to use Microsoft Word and Excel. They were having their computer speed-typing lesson, so I challenged the fastest typist to a race. She left me in the dust — to the cheering delight of her classmates. "Dust" is an appropriate word, because a drought in this area of southern India has left dust everywhere. "These kids — their parents are ragpickers, coolies and quarry laborers," said the school's principal, Lalita Law. "They come from homes below the poverty line, and from the lowest caste of untouchables, who are supposed be fulfilling their destiny and left where they are — according to the unwritten laws of Indian society. We get these children at age 4. They don't know what it is to have a drink of clean water [or use a toilet]. They bathe in filthy gutter water — if they are lucky to have a gutter near where they live. They don't even have proper scraps of clothing. We have to start by socializing them. When we first get them, they run out and urinate and defecate wherever they want. [At first] we don't make them sleep on beds because it is a culture shock. Our goal is to give them a world-class education so they can aspire to careers and professions that would have been totally beyond their reach, and have been so for generations.” After our little typing race, I asked the 8-year-olds what they wanted to be. Their answers were: "an astronaut," "a doctor," "a pediatrician," "a poetess," "physics and chemistry," "a scientist and an astronaut," "a surgeon," "a detective," "an author." Looking at these kids,
Mr. George said,
"They are the ones who have to do well for India to succeed." (See his Web site, www.tgfworld.org.) |
 |