Bhat's Notes

When you give, it is far more than the act of giving. First speaker is about conventional giver’s  pride as against unconventional recipient.

The fact remains that these pictures of agony are from my generation. The same time we have built the towers and airports. By changing the infrastructure you don’t change the life of people. By changing their lives, you do. 

Is this problem of thought processes or issue of non-issue? Every third kid in private schools wear glasses, this site not the case in public schools. They have good eye sight. Is education hampered because a little kid can’t see? I have never seen an 80 year old truck driver wearing glasses. Accidents are happening not because drivers sight. I call these non-issues.

Food, clothing and shelter we say. Cloth is remembered for disaster and charity. A person I know picks unclaimed dead bodies in Delhi. I spent time with him. Large homeless people die and this Habib bhai gets paid Rs.20 per body. In winters his work goes up. He picks 10-12 every day in winters. His little daughter said “when I feel cold, I hug the dead body and sleep, it doesn’t trouble me”. We started working on it. The moment you say, I want to donate a cloth, we want you to say you are discarding a cloth.

The biggest asset of the villagers is self respect and dignity. Why can’t we use second hand materials as currency. We called it cloth for work. People pick their own issues, work on them, for few days they use materials instead of currencies.

Citizens build a road on their own with whatever they have. Even ponds and wells with no technicians and just with local wisdom. Where the water will come is decided by coconut. That is how villagers do. They have wells for ages. We ignored the traditional wisdom. This is our currency. People volunteer not for money or clothing but for ownership. 

People decide. Bridges, mangroves, lakes and anything and everything is possible if we see other things as currency. The ones whom we call unskilled and peripherals, they give currency called labor. This is revival of traditional bartering between labor and materials. This has become a total of 100 crore working capital. No more charity is a relief.

Every woman needs a sanitary cloth. No solution for poorer or half the world. Women use dirty cloth and wash it and some women in the same household share the same cloth as cycles are different. Women use anything that stops and absorbs. World around use even cow dung or dirt rags. A simple peace of cloth saves one’s uterus. We need to remove the shame and silence out of this.

Stop landfills and burning waste. Make it currency. Make the mats out of old clothes.

The face might be different, kids are all across without clothes or property clothing. We don’t do anything about these kids. My role is to change the perception. Even if we do little, things change big warm world needs doers and not thinkers. Start looking at things from others lenses. Whenever you see this kid, what is the thought that comes. Say. Provide clothes, can you do something about it. Deprived? Relate hunger to this kid. Do something.

If we talk about this kid, we all come up with negative words.

The kid is not hungry and is not deprived. HR is asking for clothes, easy to take the second kid to school and not the first one. You suffer in winter without clothes. Hoe do kids go to school without clothes. Clothing js the first visible sign of property, they decide richness.

You can the second person uncle. Your behavior changes with the clothing.