unheard voices

A birthday card is something, that I have made all these 20 years for my Mom, Dad and on their anniversary. Being born to creative parents that is the only time I get to show them how much of their gene I carry. As a little girl, I remember those fun times with Dad when we sat down to make a card and he would amaze me with different creative designs. I remember how much fun we had with colours and how much we fought on which colours to use. I remember those Sundays specially when there is a birthday coming up in the family he would teach me different designs using scale, thread, brush and so many more. I also remember how irritated Mom used to get when we dirtied the place but eventually she would always calm down smiling at the outcome. MAD series on the television set gave me a lot of ideas too and I also  tried experimenting with those. That particular summer,I was so bored sitting at home that I wanted to try making candles, I thought of different designs and I was pre-occup...

'Mamma I am coming home' was my status update on facebook, counting back days to go back home, summer vacation was finally there. It was probably one of those rare summer vacations when my parents did not plan out a trip for us, definately because their work load was sky high. They were struggling with one of their turn over projects, designing and building  'St. Marys provincial house' in Christian Basti, Guwahati. Not getting enough time to spend with them at home, I decided to accompany them to their site one day. While sitting and talking to my mom and the sisters, I spotted kids at a distance. Inquisitively I asked the sisters and it was then when i learnt about Videsh. Videsh was an international NGO run by the sisters, and these kids visited them for one of their programmes where the under priviledged kids come every evening to the provincial house to learn and play. On knowing this, I got interested and enthusiastically asked I if  could help them in any way...

Loafing around most of my time at home, constantly blabbering non sense all the time, I strike a great chord with the girl at my place, I call her my friend and one really close to me as she sees me in all my moods; sad, happy, angry or crazy. Staying  up late hours at night in the pretext of studying I mostly land up completing stages in Angry Birds or fighting with Gravity Guy, and on one such day when I completed Gravity Guy, I felt myself gravity less and let out a sudden shriek of joy. Without realizing it was 2 am in the morning I disturbed her in her sleep. She jumped up from a bad dream, not being able to go back to sleep again, we both started talking. Night time is anyway a time when emotions are the weakest, what I did not know was I was not the only one who adhered to such a theory. The girl who smiled with me in the broad day light also felt the same and she slowly started speaking,uncovering her life. She started asking me if I knew what w...

Loafing around most of my time at home, constantly blabbering non sense all the time, I strike a great chord with the girl at my place, I call her my friend and one really close to me as she sees me in all my moods; sad, happy, angry or crazy. Staying  up late hours at night in the pretext of studying I mostly land up completing stages in Angry Birds or fighting with Gravity Guy, and on one such day when I completed Gravity Guy, I felt myself gravity less and let out a sudden shriek of joy. Without realizing it was 2 am in the morning I disturbed her in her sleep. She jumped up from a bad dream, not being able to go back to sleep again, we both started talking. Night time is anyway a time when emotions are the weakest, what I did not know was I was not the only one who adhered to such a theory. The girl who smiled with me in the broad day light also felt the same and she slowly started speaking,uncovering her life. She started asking me if I knew what was love or how woul...

In a small place under the Ulubari flyover,Guwahati lives in a community, a community who has migrated from Punjab to Guwahati during the partition of India and then settled there. They earn their daily living by cleaning around places and so they are also known as the cleaners colony. They almost go to work to every corner of Guwahati, starting from Kamakhya to Guwahati Medical College , Secretariat and other domestic places but their existence is hardly recognized. My first visit there was a rough one. In the broad daylight i was eve teased by drunk surd boys playing carrom on the road, feeling a little uncomfortable i decided to come back. Next day i approached the head man of the Sikh community there, he took me around and showed me the community and their living condition. I then started conversing and making friends. In a few days i got pally with few of the ladies and made a very good friend, Sunita without whose support i would not have been able to uncover those unheard...

Are we forgetting one of our native industry? Pottery being an age old handicraft, the roots of whose date back to the indus valley civilization seems to be fading away. This very thought kept on disturbing me for quite some time when i finally decided to visit one of the pottery village in the outskirts of delhi called Kumhargram. Here, hundreds of potter families migrated during severe famine from Rajasthan in search for better living condition. Out  of the hundreds of families only a handful could climb a little high on their career lader and the rest remained deprived. Creativity is the life-line of the potters; their unique craftsmanship indicates the artistic manifestation of rural India. If implemented effectively, it could be a sustainable model of development that is artisan led is what got me thinking. Skilled potters have the potential throughout India for constituting a rich human resource base, and common clay, being one of the cheapest raw materials available, hold...