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BOOK HEAVEN FOR CHILDREN

Are you one of those people who want to help others but don’t know how?....time to get off your seats then. How would you like to help some little boys and girls to build their own library? By doing some very simple things you can help bring a dream to reality for the children of DONBOSCO SNEHA BHAVAN, a home for children rescued from the streets.

The DONBOSCO volunteers run many institutions across kerala and especially kochi for the welfare of children rescued from child labour, beggary etc. their dream is to build a library exclusively for the children of kochi, particularly the suburban area which has no reading facility for children. The library, once open, will be a one of its kind facility, providing children an opportunity to interact with each other and to discover the land of books and learning. Each of can become a part of this dream project, nicknamed ‘book heaven’. Let’s tell you how, all of you must still have most of the books you read as children, just donate them to the library. You can also give away appropriate books , magazines etc which you’ve finished reading. Simple enough right?...

It’s understandable if you’re reluctant to let go of your favourite books from childhood, but just imagine how those books can light up the faces of a whole new generation. These children have a dream which we can help fulfill. Let’s help. If you don’t have books to give away, you can even donate children’s magazines in both English and Malayalam (yes, balarama, kalikudukka etc are fine!) there are other ways to get involved too. You can help the library by volunteering. As volunteers you can help the children arrange the books and also inspire them to read by organizing small book readings. If your family or friends have book collections lying around, or if they can be persuaded to help in any other way, let them know about this little project. Spread the word in the campus, organize a book collection drive and visit snehabhavan with your college mates…. Come on people, show them what we, the youth can do.

Here’s where you need to go to- Don Bosco Sneha Bhavan, palluruthy.kochi-682006

Telephone (0484) 2231009

Mobile. Fr. Kuriakose -9747556634

E-mail snehabhavan@satyam.net.in

If you have books to donate but have difficulty reaching it, contact student ticket and we’ll make sure it reaches. And that’s a promise.

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A little understanding……….

My best friend is always in trouble with my teacher. Her crime: she's always late to class in the morning. She's so bad at being punctual that none of us, teacher included, expect her in class before at least half an hour after class has started. All of us have flaws. Tardiness is her imperfection. Some times we wonder if it's physically impossible for her to come to class on time. But friends are supposed to be under standing right? And the only way to understand is to find out why. Why is she late to class every single day? What are the road blocks on her path to becoming a teacher's pet?

Now, my friend's a typical teenage girl (although with enough brains to know that Europe is not a country). Anyways, she lives in a typical teenager's world where many things are expected of you as a 'typical teenage girl'. After class, some unwritten rule insists that all of us friends hang around chatting about everything and nothing for at least two hours at our class room or at the bus stop or the friendly neighborhood shop cum restaurant, which means that she reaches home a full three hours after class.

Once home the beast in her takes over and she spends some time nourishing her body, tired from her efforts at fulfilling her typical teenage duties. Being a girl and eighteen, she's doomed to spend the following two hours taking a bath and grooming her hair, skin, nails and eyebrows. She painstakingly scrubs, plucks, waxes, tones and moisturizes. At the end of this tedious routine, she's left with very little time to do her home work and more importantly, to watch TV to enrich her head with very important pieces of information which every teen should know if she's to sustain any two minute conversation with her peers .She dutifully spends her time enlightening herself on the lives of reality tv stars, actors and other 'celebs' . In the midst of this come urgent calls from her friends –boyfriend problems, movie on Saturday?- she multi tasks and manages them all. And if , god forbid, any of her friends has a birthday coming up, she has to spend hours deciding on a gift and making plans to bring about that 'surprise' every birthday girl expects. After all this exhausting work she logs on to her orkut/facebook/whatever... account to do the mandatory amount of social net 'work'-ing . she spends hours replying to all those annoying scraps and scribbles and fending off irritating friend requests from either boring people with no profile photos or hyper active ones with 900 friends. Then at last, past midnight she shuts her laptop with tired eyes only to suddenly remember that the assignment given a month ago was due the next day. Ever the responsible pupil, she dutifully finishes it and collapses onto her mattress after another round of combing, scrubbing and moisturizing.

She is shook from her slumber by the faithful phone alarm which shouts out some annoying tone. Snooze. Five minutes.There it goes again. Her mom pokes her head into the room. My friend pretends to get up and goes back to sleep. Then a pair of hands, her mom's, physically removes her from the bed and shakes her till she wakes up.

My poor friend, with only an hour and a half till class begins, takes a ten minute bath and proceeds to dress. An act of no consequence which would take five minutes you'd think. But you'd be very, very wrong. She is about to make the most important decision of the day in our typical teenage world. That un-answerable question: 'what should I wear??'. She spends half an hour contemplating and trying on different sets of clothes. Then she puts on her favorite pair of jeans and a carefully picked top and proceeds to makeup and hair. She tries on different hair dos and then takes a look at the clock and puts it all into a pony. She carefully puts on eye make-up and lipstick .She hunts her drawer for earrings and other paraphernalia and puts them on. And voila, she's done. Ready to face the world. Thirty minutes to class. What else? Books! She puts her texts and notes into her bag and stuffs her lunch in. no time for break fast, has to catch that last minute bus. She races towards the bus stop, the bus is already at the stop. She runs. The bus jerks forward and then stops again for a lady. She waves wildly. The bus passes her by. The conductor grins.

She waits for the next bus. Ten minutes till class begins. Where have all the buses gone? The next one takes another five minutes to arrive. She jumps in. she prays for the bus to over speed. The conductor looks her up and down as she gives him her student ticket change. 'Card' he says.. She fishes out that scrawny little yellow card. The guy looks at her photo and scrutinizes all the little details in it. He gives it back with the ticket. The bus is overflowing. Guys hang on to the door handles with their life. The driver drives slowly lest he should accidentally shake off some of the people dangling on one side. Old ladies push and shove and mess up my friends carefully combed hair. The bus plods through the dirt tracks which lead to the city.

After twenty minutes of torture my friend is pushed out at the college stop by a torrent of humanity. Her dress is crumpled and she realizes that the bath she took in the morning had been a waste. The class has already started. She rushes with other late-birdies and risks her life crossing the road with no zebra crossings or signals. She walks as fast as she can. The campus is eerily quiet. She almost slips and falls while climbing the stairs in her clumsy slippers. She runs to class and is joined by other late comers to our class. They wait at the door with embarrassed expressions as the teacher tries to figure out what to do with them , " oh, just come in…"she says in exasperation. "The next time, I will send you to the principal, why can't you come to class on time? You're only students. What's keeping you so busy that you can't make it to class on time....?"

With all due respect ma'am, you have no idea………..

God's own...?

Once upon a time in Kerala, backpacking, white skinned, tourists were a rare sight. We malayalees used to peer at them with wide eyes from wayside teashops, children used to wave wildly at the 'madhamma' and 'sayippu' who rode past in motorbikes.

But it took only a few years for everything to change. India soon became 'incredible' and our very own Kerala became 'God's own country' (god help those who coined the term). Tourists and travellers now land on our shores by the tons. Busloads of air conditioned tourists and hippy backpackers and bikers zoom past us everyday as they hop from resort to resort. Tourism has become one of the most hyped up industries in the country and thanks to vigorous ad campaigns; the 'tourist' is no longer a rarity. In the desperate bid of a developing nation to up its economic 'progress', tourism has gained tremendous importance and in many instances the down sides of the industry are conveniently neglected.

Take a look at Kerala for instance. Every village in Kerala worth its weight in coconut palms has now declared itself a tourist destination. Village dames arm themselves with 'kayi kotti kali' , tourism committees round up cricket playing boys to teach them traditional crafts and give them 'stipends' to keep them from running away; All in a bid to fit into the stereotyped image of a 'typical' village without any thought given to the carrying capacity , infrastructure, waste management or resource availability..

Most tourists who come to Kerala are people who travel with tour companies and visit a handful of places in the little time they have. The destinations frequented by such travelers have become special zones where every thing that's anything is tailored to suit the needs of tourists; every shop sells over priced handicrafts, fake antiques and Kashmiri shawls, every things packaged to suit the attention spans and interests of the traveler. From dumbed down versions of the kathakali to fake ayurvedic massages, every thing is standardized so that the local population's identity and culture becomes a commodity to be packaged and sold. The influx of outsiders in search of lucrative tourism revenue and the sudden changes in living costs and lifestyle push out much of the local population.

As the number of visitors increase beyond the carrying capacity of an area, the local population slowly loses access to its own resources and end up as second class citizens. Already in most of the best selling tourist destinations, land prices have become so high due to large-scale buying by big companies that none of the local population could dream of buying a cent more of the land in which they grew up. Even in places which don't really have much to offer to a tourist, mere rumours of 'tourism development' have pushed up land prices. Along with this, other resources like water are also depleted due to pollution and large scale exploitation.

Leave aside the pollution and resource depletion and skyrocketing land prices caused by uncontrolled tourism, what is most shocking is the fact that we Indians, the native population are slowly becoming unwelcome at the most hyped up tourist destinations and resorts. Instances are many when local population is turned away with various excuses from eateries and wayside cafes which target easy to please foreign travelers who would pay outrageous sums to sit in the sun and sample anything spicy and 'Indian'. In large resorts and hotels, the staff complains that Indians 'dirty the place'. One would expect that the four or five figure sum that 'Indians' shell out along with the foreigners would ensure equal hospitality too, but then again , we Indians have always been stingy with tips compared to foreigners. All of these along with the unconscious belief in the superiority of white skin embedded deep within the minds of most of us result in a raw deal for domestic travelers and the locals .Unsuspecting Indians can be seen screaming 'wasn't what I paid money?' after being shocked by second class hospitality. What are we coming to when the local population's rights are compromised for the sake of dollar bills? This form of 'apartheid' is slowly growing in our country as the gap between deep pocketed foreigners and ordinary local population widens. Whose country is this? God's or the tourist's?

Well ... maybe we do deserve this. We, who have taken away the native lands and livelihoods of the indigenous tribal populations, are now being pushed to the sidelines by others like us. This is God's country after all.

Movie review- JUNO

Once in a while will come a film that sees the world from the perspective of a youngster ; a film that sees things as they are and doesn’t make a big deal out of itself. Juno is such a film. Don’t get scared by my altar talk folks. It’s NOT boring. In fact, it’s the most engaging film I’ve seen in a while. The film tells the story of juno, a young middle class girl of sixteen, and deals with Teen ..ahem,…pregnancy (don’t read ahead if you are one of those people who still think storks brought you home…. Grow up!).

The film portrays, sensitively and with a great sense of humour, the dilemmas faced by the young girl as she tries to make the best out of a seemingly hopeless situation. After a narrow ‘escape’ from an abortion clinic she decides to give the baby up for adoption and confronts her parents with the news. Her parents accept her decision and the family embarks on a wild ride with Juno as she bravely faces the world with her growing belly. Juno’s search for adoptive parents for her baby leads her to a successful, urban couple who are desperately searching for a baby to adopt as their own. In the middle of all this blooms the tender love story between juno and an athlete, a teenage boy who also happens to be the father of her child. Juno captures our mind with her intelligence, wit, her passion for music, movies and her undying soldier spirit. She fights on even when the adoption procedures threaten to come to stand still.The witty observations she makes on her life and the people around her are hilariously real. One word to describe this incredible movie : hope. Go watch it people, dig it up from somewhere and just GO watch it. It’ll open up a whole new way of lookin at things. Trust ticket.

JUNO

A film by :Jason reitman

Ellen page dazzles as Juno and

Michael cera plays her adorably weird friend….

REVERSE SOUR GRAPES ....(on my tryst with an entrance exam)

There are three reasons why a relationship fails;
1. The two parties in the relationship dislike each other.
2. One party is too good for the other.
3. One party is too bad for the other.
When I set out to establish a relationship with an institution of higher education, by way of preparing for the entrance to its five year integrated MA course, it was under the assumption that we - myself and the institute - shared a concern, or what could be called a soft corner, for each other. I certainly did. Whether it was reciprocated or not from the side of the institute, I never came to know. (If I did, I wouldn't be writing this in the first place!).
So this brings you to the veritable conclusion that the relationship, I wished fervently to begin, was never consummated. So like all disillusioned lovers I channelised my energies to understanding why this happened...why?...oh..why!
And it was through continual formation and rejection of varied hypotheses that I finally struck gold - the three statements above. And then came the stage of application of the principles arrived at in the situation described above.
In this particular problem the first statement will certainly be false; in this case one party - I, me, myself - truly liked the other party and was hopeful of a fruitful relationship.
So we move on to the next two formulations, namely one party is too good and one party is too bad for the other.
These when applied to my situation, you would be surprised to know, brought out magical results. They, the two principles, were exceedingly apposite to my situation.
I was too good for the institute.
The institute was too bad for me.
And perhaps this realisation left an indelible mark on the heart of the institute that it decided - ever so sadly- to free me from its clutches. Poor institute. I really feel for you.
And that is how our relationship ended. And I moved on.
As for the strenuous preparation I put in; those were just the abortive jumps of the institute to get me. Poor fox of an institute. he!he!he!


shraddha vinodkutty

Road kill

Like many youngsters, I live an adventure everyday. And I don’t mean it in the romantic, ‘my life’s great!’ kinda way at all. The thought occurred to me while commuting to my home from college in a bus with people bursting out through its doors and windows. Hanging from the rails at the door, almost fainting due to the congestion and suffocation inside ; Holding on to dear life while the driver showed off the precision of his brakes (ouch! That really hurt) and his skills at overtaking speeding buses which , unlike our bus, didn’t have the entire population of Kochi inside them.

you think you know who you are but you will be surprised at how many more times selfish, snobbish and cheaper you are until you’ve traveled in one of the ‘private’ buses in the rush hours. Boy, won’t that be revelation! There I was , this evening, waiting for the bus to come take me home. Feeling good about myself. Confident, socially conscious, principled young woman that I am. And then came the bus. It stops reluctantly a mile away from the bus stop. I forget my sophisticated airs and run to the ramshackle vehicle. Many older, hardened ‘chechis’ push and shove to get in first. I wait patiently with an unsteady look on my face. There’s no seat in there! Where are you people rushing to?!. "Get in there fast", the bus conductor growled and I jumped in. the bus was sufficiently crowded. I found a comfortable place to lean on through my hour long commute. the bus reached the next bus stop. A group, well, a mob of students waited at the stop for the same bus just the way I had waited a while before. How my heart fell as the we stopped to let them in. my social conscience and basic humanity evaporated at the thought of being squeezed in further by all those annoying people. I checked myself. They’re people too. They need to get home just like you do. Crap!

My body feels pricked by strangers' touch, their smells, the sweat. The girl in front of me has long frizzy hair. It keeps getting into my face. I fight hard to keep it out of my mouth. I make clear signs of displeasure. She looks at me. What’s she supposed to do? The bus is crowded beyond all imagination. The old ladies keep complaining. Why don’t these people shut up?

I hungrily eye the group who’s to get off at the next stop. My legs will give away any second now. I keep trying to prevent myself from falling into the lap of the old lady at the adjacent seat. People are getting out now. I politely move to let them go. How I wish I had had the guts to rush for their seats. Its all gone now. How did these people manage to grab those empty seats so fast?.....the rest of the people seem to expand to take up the vacant spaces. I can’t find my feet. My hair’s a mess. I smell like an old currency note.

The bus conductor kept shouting for his money. Old, hardened ladies shouted for him to shut his mouth up as they tried to fish out notes from their bags. The exertion had left me drained. I tried to keep myself conscious by reading the hoardings outside and talking to myself in my head about the others who crowded beside me. A lady coughs. A small child started to cry non stop. Right when I thought it was getting easier. ‘would you shut that thing up?’ I shout into my head. I’m never having children.

I passed my measly change to the conductor. He eyes me suspiciously. ‘student concession’ . he accusingly thrusts the ticket into my hands. "you should be paying me for traveling in your mad truck" I tell him in my head. Humph…!

Can’t you drive this thing any faster?........ are we there yet?...

nandini