And this is my other niece Zaini in Delhi missing her aunt Anni in the US.;)
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The Journey of my Ford Fellowship from rural India to Appalachian America
Documenting my Ford Foundation International Fellowship Program experience – the beginning, the journey, the challenges, the achievements, the reflections.
My IFP journey began in a rather unusual way. I landed at the Ohio airport with an injured foot and went straight to the hospital, where I spent the first week. Historic American elections that eventually gave America its first black president and a strong hope to the rest of the world, was on going. Major debate was on healthcare and the two presidential candidates were constantly debating their views on health. As I watched all of these debates on a television installed in my hospital room, health was echoing at a different level in my own psyche. The health insurance provided by the IFP covered almost all my medical expenses, which I must admit, according my standards in India were outrageous. That explained to be, the concerns Obama was raising throughout his campaign. In many ways, it seemed to me that he(Obama) was debating for me too. After three days in the hospital, I was able to walk around and met several patients in that hospital in Columbus, one of the biggest and commercially vibrant cities of America. Most of these patients were old and women and were rarely visited by anyone, friends or family members. They lived in loneliness and sickness. The next three days in the hospital gave me a serious insight of a highly individualistic society of which I was going to be a part of for the coming two years; coming two crucial years. This experience of isolation, capitalistic mindset and the tendency that measures everything prepared me for the life outside of the hospital, a privileged place that remained unaffordable to as many as 47 million of its citizenry.
I almost immediately changed by mode to tune myself to this new environment. From these initial days in the hospital, I realized how strongly supported I was with the Ford Fellowship.
The Beginnings
As I reached the college campus, first on a wheel chair and later walking on clutches around a hilly campus which often reminded me of Shimla (a hill station in northern India), I experienced a strong sense of diversity. People of all color and ages, students and faculty, students who also worked and faculty who also prayed and went shopping with us, community members who visited our library, farmers who were also authors and peace activists and so on. The beginnings were the most powerful moments of my entire IFP experience. I instantly made friends with many community members, who were community gardeners and organic farmers at the Athens farmers market that I frequently visited. It is through these friendships that I was introduced to the Appalachian America, a developing region of a developed nation that shared almost all of its socio-economic characteristics with rural India I grew up in. A region that remained invisible and hidden to the rest of the world perhaps due to the glitter and show that so strongly dominated the sound and images of the hustling bustling New York City and Las Vegas in the media that reached millions like me rendering Appalachia and its life almost nonexistent and mysteriously unknown. At that moment I knew I had a lot to explore and gather, and tell the untold stories.
Appalachian experience has a strong impact on me and like an explorer I was immersed in its life and people writing papers, doing participatory observations and taking courses that gave me academic insight of the economically suppressed but culturally rich region.
The Journey
As a ford fellow I was strongly invested in the campus life. The fact that I was externally funded by IFP and did not have to work to support my studies made me feel privileged, on one hand and more responsible on the other. My other friends were not just studying and doing assignments that I was doing but they were also working to support their studies. At times it made me feel ‘less than them’, at other times, guilty and yet at other moments I felt a stronger sense of ‘how much more can I do’ given my higher incentives, as a Ford Fellow on campus. These mixed feelings gave me more energy and constantly pushed me to challenge my own power to achieve things. I started getting involved and invested both academically and practically, with classmates and professors and with community members and other college campuses. Soon enough I was representing my class to the center’s Executive Director during monthly meetings, briefing him about the class going-ons and student’s aspirations and gaps. This representation was extended for the second year as well. In the second year I also represented my entire program as the Senator at the Graduate Student Senate that met weekly to discuss the administrative roles and responsibilities, new acts, funding etc that can potentially help students. This was my first tryst with the student’s politics in America. It enriched me and sharpened my political understanding of how a campus is run and what larger role can it play in the social change movement. One writer who writings inspired me most during this time was Howard Zinn. Sadly, I also witnessed his sad demise during my time in the US.
In addition to this, I also served as the Communication Chair of the Muslim Student Association, representing 25 global nationalities from Asia, Africa, Middle East and North America at several university and community platforms. As a Secretary of the Ford Foundation Students’ Association and as member of UNICEF and Save the Children student bodies on campus I made several efforts to help build a safer and healthy word for children.
Overall, these experiences, encounters, and travels that came along gave me more than what I expected from an academic program at Ohio University. The roles I took, travels I made and academic work that I produced collectively built my personality and integrated it with the citizenry of the new country I visited for the first time. So much so that one of its member citizens became a lifelong friend, as my wife and decided to come with me to India and live here, to contribute towards it social development, working with me in the areas of social conflict resolution, social entrepreneurship and curriculum development. This relationship is a result of a shared vision that intends to build a world of social justice led by grassroots leadership and governed by participatory pedagogies. As I reflect, I could not have asked for more!
The Challenges
It took me some time to understand the dynamics of a new society which was almost entirely different from my past experience. Socially, politically, technologically and economically, I was dealing with a new system at all fronts. One of the major challenges was to make friends and alliances in a way that it not only serves a personal goal of networking and leisure but also builds a strategic partnership that would help fulfill my fellowship goal of bringing resources back to India and directing them to its development. Cultural subtleties were to be learnt and the social language was to acquired. It took time. But with relevant readings and persistent listening it happened. Another challenge was to constantly engage outside of academia while working with it. Writing papers, reading texts and reflecting on in-class experiences, while at the same time going out and experiencing, in very practical terms, the lives of the people, their challenges, their work, their aspirations, struggles and visions. Striking a balance between academic excellence and practical wisdom and using both to each other’s advantage was a good challenge to take on. It again came from reading, listening and travelling. It also came from becoming technology savvy- learning tools in the library, labs and resources like community library available outside of the campus, and building alliances with civic organizations working on grassroots issues. Besides, engaging in conversations and discussions with classmates and students from other programs to learn from their experiences and work always remained a priority and a challenge given the tight academic timeline. The main challenge was to become a public intellectual both on-campus and outside of it and contribute to the immediate society during the period of studentship. Building networks and creating engagements that can be extended at a global level with relevance to the Indian development scenario was another challenge on priority.
The Achievements and Reflections
One of my major achievements is the working relationships I built with my professors and friends across the world through on-campus, in community and in-class interactions. A relationship that will engage me in several global developmental issues for the rest of my life in a way that will affect India, my home country in a positive way. As I reflect, I realize much of it happened due to my listening and reading skills that were developed in India .What also helped was the grassroots experiences and the knowledge of Indian social context and grassroots dynamics on which I could speak confidently, given my training and exposure in India, while engaging with contemporary texts on technology and globalization. I was constantly able to connect with my institutions and organizations in my home country to bring their latest perspective and challenges in the classroom and juxtapose them with theories studied in the class. This interconnectivity of realities and theories was a unique experience and an extraordinary experience in terms of experiential learning and my small contribution to the educational system that I was a part of in the US.
As I returned to India, I bring with me not only the new knowledge I acquired but also the expertise of the people I met and built relationships with,thus bringing-in a strategic leverage to the Indian social development-potential.
I intend to consolidate my networks through building new collaborations and developing new projects using new technology to continue working for the educational and health reforms I conceived at the time of writing my IFP application.
I am confident that I will achieve more than I envisioned and will go beyond my initial to-do-draft that I wrote as a part of my return-India plan presentation at IFP orientation two years ago .I consider this my achievement.
I owe all my achievements to the support I got from the IFP and its many incentives, together with the encouragement and the timely guidance that came from the IFP team in New Delhi and New York. I am thankful to IFP teams, and will endeavor to translate my gratitude into those actions and values for which IFP stands for; Social Justice and Social Change, through all my work, now on.
My IFP journey began in a rather unusual way. I landed at the Ohio airport with an injured foot and went straight to the hospital, where I spent the first week. Historic American elections that eventually gave America its first black president and a strong hope to the rest of the world, was on going. Major debate was on healthcare and the two presidential candidates were constantly debating their views on health. As I watched all of these debates on a television installed in my hospital room, health was echoing at a different level in my own psyche. The health insurance provided by the IFP covered almost all my medical expenses, which I must admit, according my standards in India were outrageous. That explained to be, the concerns Obama was raising throughout his campaign. In many ways, it seemed to me that he(Obama) was debating for me too. After three days in the hospital, I was able to walk around and met several patients in that hospital in Columbus, one of the biggest and commercially vibrant cities of America. Most of these patients were old and women and were rarely visited by anyone, friends or family members. They lived in loneliness and sickness. The next three days in the hospital gave me a serious insight of a highly individualistic society of which I was going to be a part of for the coming two years; coming two crucial years. This experience of isolation, capitalistic mindset and the tendency that measures everything prepared me for the life outside of the hospital, a privileged place that remained unaffordable to as many as 47 million of its citizenry.
I almost immediately changed by mode to tune myself to this new environment. From these initial days in the hospital, I realized how strongly supported I was with the Ford Fellowship.
The Beginnings
As I reached the college campus, first on a wheel chair and later walking on clutches around a hilly campus which often reminded me of Shimla (a hill station in northern India), I experienced a strong sense of diversity. People of all color and ages, students and faculty, students who also worked and faculty who also prayed and went shopping with us, community members who visited our library, farmers who were also authors and peace activists and so on. The beginnings were the most powerful moments of my entire IFP experience. I instantly made friends with many community members, who were community gardeners and organic farmers at the Athens farmers market that I frequently visited. It is through these friendships that I was introduced to the Appalachian America, a developing region of a developed nation that shared almost all of its socio-economic characteristics with rural India I grew up in. A region that remained invisible and hidden to the rest of the world perhaps due to the glitter and show that so strongly dominated the sound and images of the hustling bustling New York City and Las Vegas in the media that reached millions like me rendering Appalachia and its life almost nonexistent and mysteriously unknown. At that moment I knew I had a lot to explore and gather, and tell the untold stories.
Appalachian experience has a strong impact on me and like an explorer I was immersed in its life and people writing papers, doing participatory observations and taking courses that gave me academic insight of the economically suppressed but culturally rich region.
The Journey
As a ford fellow I was strongly invested in the campus life. The fact that I was externally funded by IFP and did not have to work to support my studies made me feel privileged, on one hand and more responsible on the other. My other friends were not just studying and doing assignments that I was doing but they were also working to support their studies. At times it made me feel ‘less than them’, at other times, guilty and yet at other moments I felt a stronger sense of ‘how much more can I do’ given my higher incentives, as a Ford Fellow on campus. These mixed feelings gave me more energy and constantly pushed me to challenge my own power to achieve things. I started getting involved and invested both academically and practically, with classmates and professors and with community members and other college campuses. Soon enough I was representing my class to the center’s Executive Director during monthly meetings, briefing him about the class going-ons and student’s aspirations and gaps. This representation was extended for the second year as well. In the second year I also represented my entire program as the Senator at the Graduate Student Senate that met weekly to discuss the administrative roles and responsibilities, new acts, funding etc that can potentially help students. This was my first tryst with the student’s politics in America. It enriched me and sharpened my political understanding of how a campus is run and what larger role can it play in the social change movement. One writer who writings inspired me most during this time was Howard Zinn. Sadly, I also witnessed his sad demise during my time in the US.
In addition to this, I also served as the Communication Chair of the Muslim Student Association, representing 25 global nationalities from Asia, Africa, Middle East and North America at several university and community platforms. As a Secretary of the Ford Foundation Students’ Association and as member of UNICEF and Save the Children student bodies on campus I made several efforts to help build a safer and healthy word for children.
Overall, these experiences, encounters, and travels that came along gave me more than what I expected from an academic program at Ohio University. The roles I took, travels I made and academic work that I produced collectively built my personality and integrated it with the citizenry of the new country I visited for the first time. So much so that one of its member citizens became a lifelong friend, as my wife and decided to come with me to India and live here, to contribute towards it social development, working with me in the areas of social conflict resolution, social entrepreneurship and curriculum development. This relationship is a result of a shared vision that intends to build a world of social justice led by grassroots leadership and governed by participatory pedagogies. As I reflect, I could not have asked for more!
The Challenges
It took me some time to understand the dynamics of a new society which was almost entirely different from my past experience. Socially, politically, technologically and economically, I was dealing with a new system at all fronts. One of the major challenges was to make friends and alliances in a way that it not only serves a personal goal of networking and leisure but also builds a strategic partnership that would help fulfill my fellowship goal of bringing resources back to India and directing them to its development. Cultural subtleties were to be learnt and the social language was to acquired. It took time. But with relevant readings and persistent listening it happened. Another challenge was to constantly engage outside of academia while working with it. Writing papers, reading texts and reflecting on in-class experiences, while at the same time going out and experiencing, in very practical terms, the lives of the people, their challenges, their work, their aspirations, struggles and visions. Striking a balance between academic excellence and practical wisdom and using both to each other’s advantage was a good challenge to take on. It again came from reading, listening and travelling. It also came from becoming technology savvy- learning tools in the library, labs and resources like community library available outside of the campus, and building alliances with civic organizations working on grassroots issues. Besides, engaging in conversations and discussions with classmates and students from other programs to learn from their experiences and work always remained a priority and a challenge given the tight academic timeline. The main challenge was to become a public intellectual both on-campus and outside of it and contribute to the immediate society during the period of studentship. Building networks and creating engagements that can be extended at a global level with relevance to the Indian development scenario was another challenge on priority.
The Achievements and Reflections
One of my major achievements is the working relationships I built with my professors and friends across the world through on-campus, in community and in-class interactions. A relationship that will engage me in several global developmental issues for the rest of my life in a way that will affect India, my home country in a positive way. As I reflect, I realize much of it happened due to my listening and reading skills that were developed in India .What also helped was the grassroots experiences and the knowledge of Indian social context and grassroots dynamics on which I could speak confidently, given my training and exposure in India, while engaging with contemporary texts on technology and globalization. I was constantly able to connect with my institutions and organizations in my home country to bring their latest perspective and challenges in the classroom and juxtapose them with theories studied in the class. This interconnectivity of realities and theories was a unique experience and an extraordinary experience in terms of experiential learning and my small contribution to the educational system that I was a part of in the US.
As I returned to India, I bring with me not only the new knowledge I acquired but also the expertise of the people I met and built relationships with,thus bringing-in a strategic leverage to the Indian social development-potential.
I intend to consolidate my networks through building new collaborations and developing new projects using new technology to continue working for the educational and health reforms I conceived at the time of writing my IFP application.
I am confident that I will achieve more than I envisioned and will go beyond my initial to-do-draft that I wrote as a part of my return-India plan presentation at IFP orientation two years ago .I consider this my achievement.
I owe all my achievements to the support I got from the IFP and its many incentives, together with the encouragement and the timely guidance that came from the IFP team in New Delhi and New York. I am thankful to IFP teams, and will endeavor to translate my gratitude into those actions and values for which IFP stands for; Social Justice and Social Change, through all my work, now on.
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