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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.