Program-1: Shimoga and Javali

12-Jun-2008, Thursday

Finally I found myself on Platform No- 10 of Bangalore Railway Station at 9:30 pm with Avinash. This was post spending quite an effort to bring about the first ever program under Parinati. We were bound to Shimoga by 11:45 pm Shimoga Express. In around another 30 mins, another team member Akshatha joined us. At around 11:15 the train chugged in. Final installment of the team- Ganesh and Manju also joined us and after full half an hour of debate on who is occupying which berth, we all settled down as the train estranged us from the visible platform.

13-Jun-2008, Friday

It was 6:20 in the morning when I had the first view of Shimoga. Though it is cool and tiny place, its first impression was nothing worth mentioning about. Avinash is a localite here and our team decided to stay put at his house for the next 3 days- that is the duration of our program. It was around 6:45 when we stood in front of a decent nice building- ‘Manjunath Nilaya’, our abode for the next few days. Avinash’s dad welcomed us warmly and warmer was the coffee that was served to us by aunty. It felt a little better as none of us had good sleep last night. We had a heavy breakfast. And as two of we took rest Avinash, Ganesh and Manju left to the school for setting up the infrastructure for our event.

The event was in the reputed Saandipini High School in Shimoga town at 2 pm. The team of five-some left for the session after having lunch. The school is quite small, as it accommodates only high-school. Our seminar was arranged in not so spacious but just-enough hall. We were here to give a seminar on ‘Advances in IT’. The seminar was well introduced by Akshatha. As planned I took the ‘Necessity of IT’ and ‘Career Guidance’ part of the seminar, while Ganesh talked on ‘Technical know-how of IT’. Quiz section was handled by Manju. The seminar was a success. Well, I am not patting our own back, but it was evident from the feedback we got from the pupils there. I believe in self-appraisal. I could definitely say that given the time constraints, we did a great job. The highlights of this program were the kids there; they were beyond our expectations and knew quite a lot of basics. They were very inquisitive and enthusiastic. I really love talking to questioning and reasoning brains. They were so enthused by such well fledged discussion on IT, that they not only asked us fair quality and quantity of questions and pulled me aside for clarification of their doubts after the seminar, but also we got a formal letter by a girl with 4 good questions to answer and send the reply. Undoubtedly, the event was a sort of self-learning for us.

We had completed one of the two tasks that we had come here for and that too it ended in positive note, so we could relax a bit now. We went to quite a decent restaurant named ‘Jewel Rock’ and had evening snacks discussing about the goods-and-bads of today’s seminar and also on how to go about tomorrow’s. Nothing much we did that evening other than visiting a barrage and a ride of a few kilometers.

14-Jun-2008, Saturday

We pumped ourselves up for yet another seminar on – ‘Basics of Computer’ in a Kannada Medium High School in a village called Javali in Chikmaglur district. We left at around 6:30 in the morning. The seminar was at 10. Javali is around 120 kms from Shimoga. It was raining heavily when we entered the Malnadu or ‘State of Mountains’. This region hosts one of the picturesque nature’s beauties. Even as we reached Javali it was still pouring. We all assembled under a parapet of the school as the morning prayers were on. We were all introduced by the principal to the kids.

We were offered a neat breakfast. It was touching as the school is not surrounded by any good hotels or even shops. It ostensibly would have been a difficult task to arrange for this. After setting up the required infrastructure we put the program in first-gear. Avinash conducted the seminar in Kannada and the event came up well. Though, due to time factor we had to skip some of the planned tasks and also the hands-on part. It was a real challenge for the team as there were just around 20 students of the over 150 assembled who had heard the name- ‘computer’, leave alone working on it. It was really tough to convince them about the need of a computer and how it has changed the lives. But at the end of the seminar we made sure that every one of them had not only heard the name but also knew its architecture, its necessity and also realize that after all you won’t get electrocuted if you touch a computer! The session was for around 2 hrs. We conducted a quiz on the stuff that we had covered. The response was average. The students here were in sharp contrast to their counterparts in Shimoga. We realized how diverse the kids from a village and an urban area are. We promised ourselves that from next time on we have got to concentrate more on villages.

We were again forced to believe that it was in villages where hospitality, love and concern and the idea of ‘Athiti Devo Bhava’ still exist. We were offered lunch. The lunch was just rice, sambar, pickle and papad but it tasted much better.

Now that we had completed both the programs that we had come here for, we went on sight seeing. Unarguably this region accommodates many breathtakingly beautiful scenes. We went to Hornadu, River Hemavati’s birth spot and many other places.

15-Jun-2008, Sunday

We boarded the bus at 11 pm, and when I opened my eyes in the morning I saw a bustling Bangalore in front of my eyes.

I will be writing about the travails of sojourn in my next blog- ‘In the cuddle of ‘Land of Mountains’’. Keep watching.