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ROLE MODELS - ALL AROUND US (IT IS JUST A MATTER OF LOOKING FOR THEM)

Hitesh V Bhatt

Last week I received a profound SMS from a student, Rajendra Khemka, of Dharmsinh Desai University, Nadiad – it said: ‘Life today, has become so Less’. Now, Our Telephone - Cord Less, Cooking - Fire Less, Youth - Job Less, Leaders - Shame Less, Government - Hope Less, Police - Clue Less, Policies - Aim Less, Labor - Effort Less, Conduct - Worth Less, Relations - Meaning Less, Feelings - Heart Less, Education - Value Less, Arguments - Base Less, Future - Direction Less, And still our expectations are - END LESS!!! (No wonder someone said LESS is MORE)

Background
In mid nineties, IRMA invited Dr. SK Chakraborty (Former Convener, Management Centre for Human Values, IIM Calcutta, and Founder Editor of Journal of Human Values) to address our community. At the end of his inspiring speech – which moved every soul sitting in the auditorium, one PRM participant commented on absence of role models in society like Vivekanand, Vinoba Bhave, M. K. Gandhi, Subash Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel and Lal Bahadur Shastri, as the biggest concern for the present generation and the declining values in the society. While I do not recollect the exact answer Dr. Chakraborty gave, the essence was to read relevant biographies and draw inspiration from the lives of our past Heroes. While I certainly followed his advice, I realized that in my day to day life, I was surrounded by some very ordinary people who were doing some of the most extra ordinary things, one could imagine. The unsung Heroes of our society - despite their humble background, they excelled and made a name for themselves. While I got inspired by them and that helped me leading a better life, I wondered if this informal personal learning could be formalized and passed on to others.

When I was growing, my grandfather played an important role in teaching basic values to me and at a personal level, I will attempt to do the same for my grand children. However, this may not happen now at large, by default, as we will see more and more of grandparents arguing endlessly with their grand children on important issues like ‘who will have the control over the remote for the lone TV – during the prime time’ or convincing their son ‘to give them a separate space to themselves with an independent DTH connection so that they will not have to worry about Tom & Jerry chasing each other anymore. The panchtantra stories have long been replaced by the more famous reality and laughter shows on the TV. We read news items on seven year olds committing suicide for fancy reasons. From own experience and that of a few more close friends, it seems that letting our younger ones go out and develop a sense of looking around for lessons of life – no matter where they come from – helps immensely in sensitizing them to the realities of life, much earlier. With passage of time, apart from graduating with a formal degree, they also turn out to be better human beings – having a better handle over their own lives.

Reinforcement

Coincidently, I found the same ingredient helping 2 of our VOLAG-MAP 2010 participants, stand out in the crowd. While all the 23 participants were extremely good, Amrut Bang and Mrs. Meena Qureshi stood out in terms of their understanding of our sector, self conduct, clarity of thinking, ability to deliver and maturity. A close interaction with them brought to surface the saga of the background of their parents, their parents’ struggles, their parents’ value systems, and upbringing by them of their children in their formative years. While the parents dotted on them, they made no compromise in the process of toughening them. Due to paucity of space, I will delve a little only - into the process Amrut went through - in this piece and space permitting, write on Mrs. Meena Qureshi’s journey in the next issue of Network.

Story of Amrut Bang

Amrut Bang was born to illustrious parents Dr. Abhay and Dr. Rani Bang, who hold a degree of MD (in Medicine and Gynecology respectively) – with a gold medal, from Nagpur University and Masters of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, USA. With their backgrounds, they could have settled anywhere in the world but inspired by the life and philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, they decided to adopt the most backward district of Maharashtra - Gadchiroli, as their ‘Karma-Bhumi’. They started working in rural areas from 1978 and founded SEARCH (Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health) in 1985. It is an institution of community health, providing health care to the local population, and generating knowledge for the global community by way of research. "Think globally, act locally" was their mantra.

Gadchiroli is a tribal area, 1092 Km from Mumbai; 182 Km from Nagpur (the nearest airport); and 85 Km from Chandrapur (the nearest railway station). They operate from ‘Shodhgram’ (search village) which is 17 kms from Gadchiroli. Dr. Abhay Bang’s journey from Gandhiji’s ‘Sevagram’ (service village) ashram to Shodhgram makes a very interesting reading and can be accessed at: http://www.searchgadchiroli.org/PDF%20files/SevagramToShodhgraEnglish.pdf

Another good article (‘Meeting the Mahatma’) written by Dr. Abhay Bang can be accessed at: http://nirman.mkcl.org/Downloads/Articles/Meeting_the_Mahatma.pdf

SEARCH believes that an important role for the voluntary organizations is path finding or research. "Research" in the context of SEARCH means to identify the problems of people and to develop new and appropriate solutions. The TIME magazine selected Dr. Abhay and Dr. Rani Bang as the Global health Heroes, and published their story in the issue of 31st October 2005.

Their Approach has been simple: go to the people, live among them, love them, listen to them, learn from them, begin with what they know, and build up on what they have. Dr.Abhay Bang is tempted to jump every fence that comes his way.

Amrut is also a nephew of Dr. Ashok and Suman Bang, who work in about 200 villages of Wardha district, through an NGO ‘Chetana-Vikas’, for empowerment of the individual and the community in the areas of agriculture and natural resource management, women's development and gender issues, and education and child development.

Amrut is grandson of an illustrious economist who tore off his admission letter - to an American University - in 1945, after Gandhiji suggested him to rather stay in Indian villages to study economics, but then that will come some other time.

Role of Dr. Abhay and Dr. Rani Bang

Amrut graduated with B.E. in Computer Engineering from Pune University in 2007. He worked for a company called SYMANTEC for eight months before joining NIRMAN.

NIRMAN is a platform for restless youth to come together and seek answers to questions like ‘what is beyond graduation & a safe job; purpose of life beyond earning money; what can be done to grapple with the several social, scientific and technological challenges faced by the society?’ NIRMAN is the place to discover oneself, and find one’s Life’s Mission - a pursuit of leading a meaningful life!

He has great memories of his childhood. While he was growing, he could not appreciate how his parents found all the time for him and gave him the warmth he required at critical junctures of his life – he took that for granted. But now when he looks back, he understands that his parents must have gone out of their way and worked extremely hard to manage their professional responsibilities along with that of raising Amrut and his sibling, Dr. Anand (another Johns Hopkins graduate working in the tribal belt for the past few years). They took them everywhere they went and involved them in their work - anti liquor movement, Traditional Birth Attendant Training, De-addition and other health camps. Amrut has the distinction of going to jail thrice with his parents when he was just seven years young – fighting menace of alcohol in the society. There, he & other inmates were treated to tea by the police and his grandfather delivered a lecture right there - within the premises of the jail. From then on, a life in jail (for the right cause) was a matter of celebration. Drs. Bang let him take his own decisions from early childhood and never interfered with whatever he did. Despite being celebrities themselves, they raised him without any fan fare and he had to rough it out with all others. He got no special privileges for being the son of a mighty couple. His best friend is still, his father’s driver’s son and he was taught, from a very young age, to respect human beings more than their positions in the society.

He was permitted to leave the school at the early age and study at home (home schooling). He used to study harder and get very high grades because he did not want others to feel that he left school as he was not good at studies. His father often used to tell him, “Study, study or else you will pass the exam without learning anything.” This meant a lot to him and for him learning became far more important than just passing an exam. At one time in his life, Amrut wanted to become a professional cricketer and his parents supported him with loads of information. They helped him in developing an open mind in life so that accepting an alternative, from many, became relatively easy. He does not recall his parents ever enforcing their views on him. They never took decisions on his behalf and instead helped him to think through rationally and come with a considered decision. They made him learn taking responsibility for his decision early in his age. Amrut learnt to accept the consequence of these decisions. Even when Amrut was deciding to join at SEARCH/NIRMAN, his parents told him not to constrain himself to Gadchiroli or NIRMAN or SEARCH. In fact they shared the weaknesses of these organisations and strengths of other organisations so that Amrut could take an objective decision. Thus, instead of holding on to Amrut, they let him go and decide for himself whatever he wanted to do.

The parents spent a lot of time with Amrut and played all kinds of games with him. They bought lots of books and Lego - even at the cost of skipping a meal during their overseas travels. It was a rule in the home that at 5.00 pm the children must be out - playing various sports and develop an attribute of becoming good team players. He was encouraged to play sports, to have dogs and to explore in jungle and just be with nature. The focus was always on excellence, efforts and merit. Amrut had no problem playing under the Captaincy of the driver’s son, though he himself was a good cricketer. There was no inequality, no partiality and no special favors for anyone. The parents taught him not to be afraid of anyone, & anything anytime. They used to remind him that he was Abhay’s (meaning fearless) son. If a mistake – however grave – was committed, one must confess & seek pardon and should not be scared of telling the truth. When he was in 11th standard his father told him that ‘money was very important - like a pair of slippers, as they must be worn to safeguard against thorns, but they cannot be worn around the neck’. His father used to say that he and Dr. Rani were blessed with lack of personal ambition. The parents gave feedback to him about his work and encouraged him to do even better.

What next

Well this is the beginning of a series of more ‘Amruts’ and their upbringing, that I will like to continue and share through the great medium of Network. Suggestions and constructive criticism are most welcome at hiteshvbhatt@irma.ac.in

Tailpiece

A few days back, I requested my colleague, Mrs. Santha George, to help me scan ‘Preface’ of a tightly bound book from our library. It was almost 5.30 pm of a Friday and she completed the scanning work and sent me the file through email by around 5.45 pm. My work was done to my satisfaction. However, on the following Monday morning she came and asked for that book again. I said to her politely that my work was done and there were no more pages to be scanned. She still asked for the book saying that the scanner at the library was not as good as the one in the main computer lab (which had closed on Friday as it was past 5.30 pm) and that she would like to repeat it all over as she was not happy with the quality of work she (please read ‘scanner’) did. I was completely taken aback by this. This has certainly not happened for the first time at IRMA – there are a few persons at IRMA who just do not like to do a shoddy job – however trivial and no matter where the demand came from. There is so much to learn while working with the likes of Mrs. Santha George - about the ‘conduct’ of a person and about ‘carrying out of a job perfectly clinical’.

Reference:

http://www.searchgadchiroli.org and http://nirman.mkcl.org

Amrut can be reached at 94225 01496 and amrutabang@gmail.com

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Professor, Institute of Rural Management, Anand.
E-mail: Hiteshvbhatt@irma.ac.in