Kalle Bhai – A man of many stories
This story by a DEF team member was first published in The Better India on January 31, 2016
Digital Empowerment Foundation team member Udita Chaturvedi shares some snippets from a trip to rural Rajasthan.
Last month, I was in Alwar district of Rajasthan (Alwar is about 160 kilometres from Delhi, and is also one of the NCR towns), accompanying two foreign nationals who’re shooting for a film in India to document how lives are changing in this country due to digital literacy.
While the film-makers were busy shooting in a Community Information Resource Centre (CIRC) established by Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) to promote digital literacy and social awareness, I was sitting among some mothers and their children, discussing their lives and understanding the difficulties they face.
It was during this conversation that I learnt that most of the mothers in Mungaska, a slum-like locality in Alwar, are either illiterate or school dropouts. While they chose not to study or were forced to drop out of school, they want proper education for their children.
Meena is the mother of an extremely talented eight-year-old boy. The boy, Aman, is born in a family of professional bhapang players and is, in fact, the youngest bhapang player himself — he started learning at the age of three! Aman, his elder brother and sister are the first school-going generation of the family. While several efforts are being made by the family to ensure that bhapang doesn’t prove to be a dying art, it is not the reason the younger generation is attending school. The reason is that Meena believes, “Education can make or break a person, but mostly make.”
Aman’s mother only studied till Grade 5 because, back then, there was no school in Mungaska for students who wanted to study beyond Grade 5. “Education is important for everything today. Whether you want to use a computer or get a government job, school education has become a must,” says Meena.
But what made her realise this?
“I have seen smart children grow up, playing in the lanes of our colony. There’s nothing wrong in playing; in fact, I encourage Aman to play after school. But I’ve seen those smart children grow into useless 20-year-olds as well. They still play cricket in the lanes all day long and live off their father’s income. What will they do when their father is no more? How will they feed their wife or children?” she questions.
Meena is very sure she wants Aman to study, and not just till Grade 12 but to go up to college. At the same time, she doesn’t want Aman to give up on his musical talents at all. In fact, she believes Aman will be able to take their family’s music to the wider audience around the globe if he’s well educated and digitally literate.
“He can do so much with the Internet,” she exclaims.
Holding similar views is Rimpy, a young mother of three children — two girls and a boy. Rimpy never went to school because she “wasn’t interested in studying”. However, when her children give her the same excuse in the morning, they’re scolded and pushed out of the house.
“Education makes a person independent. It will help them get a job, or even fight the society if someday nobody supports them. I know my life could have been so much different had I been to school. If nothing, I could have at least brought in some extra income into the house and, maybe, my family would even listen to my opinions more if I was educated,” she says.
Rimpy is a housewife. One of her friends studied till Grade 12 and got married. However, a year later her husband died and she returned to her parents’ house in Mungaska. Here, she enrolled at a CIRC, established by DEF, and learnt computers. Rimpy wishes she had been to school too, because learning computers for her at the age of 30 with no education at all was far more difficult than she had imagined. While her widow friend aced, she lagged behind. Now, Rimpy doesn’t want her children to face a similar fate.
“School education is as important as computer training. In fact, all school should also teach children computers,” she says.
There are many others like Meena and Rimpy who understand the value of education — both traditional and digital — because they themselves have been deprived of it for some reason or the other.
In today’s time, where knowledge of computers has become crucial, English has become an aspirational language and a degree has become mandatory for jobs, it is silly to not go to school or learn computers, believes Rafia, a mother of a nine-year-old girl. “Even Modi (Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi) wants the youngsters to learn computers today!” she adds.
However, I would be lying if I say that every child in Mungaska understands the importance of education. While a lot of them enjoy going to school or learning computers in a group at the CIRC, there are some who only attend school because they’re forced by their parents or only visit the CIRC centre because they get to play games or use Google Search after an hour of practicing on Microsoft Office.
Google Search, in fact, seemed like the second favourite — after Facebook, of course — feature of the Internet for most children.
A Grade 3 student, Aman (yes, the same bhapang player) uses Google Search to travel, though his travel has been restricted to Alwar and Delhi so far. He says, “The day before, I searched for Qutub Minar on Google after I read about it in my school textbook. Do you know how tall it is? It’s 240 feet tall!” He was right, I cross checked on the Internet.
The story was no different in Chandauli village where Sahil was coincidentally looking up about Taj Mahal when I entered the CIRC there. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, “People from America come to India to see the Taj Mahal, so I wanted to see it too. But I can’t travel to Agra, it’s very far. So I am looking it up on Google.”
Sahil showed me at least a dozen different pictures of Taj Mahal, each from a different angle. By the time he finished, he had inspired other children at the centre to look up some city or the other. Somebody used Google Search to travel to Agra while another travelled to Jaipur.
A kid even asked Will, one of the film-makers in our group, where he was from and then looked up “America” but he soon lost interest and searched for the Red Fort in Delhi instead.
The visit to Alwar game me a whole new perspective about how these CIRCs are impacting the society. It’s not just about digital literacy and learning how to operate Microsoft Office tools but it’s much more. DEF has eight CIRCs in as many villages of Alwar district (and a total of 150 across 23 Indian states) where the poorest of the poor spend their quality time learning computers, playing with the Internet and utilising various digital tools. It is interesting how these digital resource centers are making children, youth — both, boys and girls — and their families look at education in a non-traditional manner, which can help bring about a change in their lives for the better.
At these centers, the locals, who had never stepped out of their village, are now traveling to various parts of the country and the world, and learning about things that they had only heard of. These villagers, who are first-time learners of digital tools, are not just learning but are also teaching us that a connected digital device is just not a tool for digital literacy but a tool that impacts them socially, behaviourally, aspirational-ly, economically and perhaps even responsibly.
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