Saturday Morning: 0300 hrs… my alarm goes off!!! And then the alarm on the other phone goes off too… I had just slept at like midnight… but getting up was important… I did… Woke up Ashu (my cousin) called up Tushar to wake him up and checked with Aro to make sure he was on his way to my place…Why get up this early on a Saturday morning?
Valid question 🙂

We four were going to Sankalp, Moradabad… The same place I had visited in Feb’07… and wrote about it HERE!

Me and Aro had been discussing this trip for a while now, and last week when I realised that my travel plans were still very unclear I decided to go to Sankalp and do what was long due… So a few phone calls over the week, some bit of planning and we were all set… Roped in Ashu and Tushar as well… so we were four of us who were traveling to Sankalp and organise the painting competition…

The weather was good, the roads were good too wit a few exceptions… It did rain almost throughout the drive and at times it was too heavy to drive as well, however with one pit stop just about 10 kms after Gajraula (Reliance A1 Food Plaza) we reached Sankalp around 0800 hrs…

I discussed the plan with Kalpana and Santosh who take care of the centre and we were all set to start the painting competition around 1030 hrs… The main centre has 100+ students and it was difficult to involve everyone in the competition, so we decided that we would let the teachers select some students from all the classes and have about 40 students participate…

We started on time around 1045 hrs and the kids finished their work around 1215 hours…

Post this we played “Stuart Little” (Hindi Version) for all the kids… (We had arranged for a LCD Projector, a laptop, the speakers and the DVD last night)… It was an amazing feeling to hear the kids laugh together and react to various scenes in the movie… One of the best experiences that I personally had EVER… So much so that I don’t have enough words to write about the entire event!!! Now there was something for the kids after the movie too… We had prepared some questions from the movie, and the kids who answer those questions right were to get prizes…

Once we finished the movie, we distributed the prizes for the Painting Competition and followed by the overwhelming question answer round!!!

We had asked everyone to first raise a hand and then we would pick who answers the question 🙂 but as you might have already guessed for 100% of the questions everyone first answered the question and then raised their hands 🙂 by the end of it we had exhausted all our questions and had to make a few set with our own knowledge of the movie 🙂 it was fun…

One question we asked was the name of Stuart Little’s father… Well no one knew the answer, but one boy very confidently stood up and said “Daddy” 🙂 I even asked the duration of the movie 🙂 when we did not know what to ask 🙂 and kids answered that too without raising any hands 🙂 too bad it did not have a prize 🙂

Did I forget to mention that Gupta ji (The caretaker at the centre) also arranged for some Aalu, Pyaaz, and Palak Pakodas for us and the Chatney with Raw Mango and fresh Mint was just too good to resist… Don’t know if I was eating the Pakodas with the Chatney or the Chatney with the Pakodas 🙂

Once we were done at the Centre we moved around in the Community to get a first hand feel of the workshops…

Did not even realise how the time flew by and it was already 1645 hours when we started back for Delhi!!! All in All a wonderful day, an experience which words cannot express, and a feeling of satisfaction…

We have brought back the winning entries from the painting competition and the plan is to sell them with support from Online friends, and people we can reach via other mediums too… In one of my next posts I am going to post the paintings and if you are interested in buying one of them please do write to me @ prashantbhardwaj@gmail.com. I am currently in the process of finding out a place where I can get them framed for a decent price.

More about Sankalp:

Sankalp is an initiative of ASK (ASKINDIA.ORG) which aims at providing educating to the children who are involved in Child Labour in Moradabad… An initiative that is not 500+ children strong and going strong with its committed workforce… The teachers for the schools also come from the local community itself, and hence help the educated local women as well.

You can read more about Sankalp, ASK and my previous visit by clicking the following links:

ASK

Sankalp on ASK Website (The page also has a few photo essays that I did the last time I visited Sankalp)

My earlier visit to Sankalp (http://rightmore.blogspot.com/2007/02/ask-me-how.html)