Nine lives that landed on their feet
The Navjyoti Awards celebrated nine bright girls who overcame India’s bottomless poverty with indomitable will.Some of their stories brought tears to our eyes
The Navjyoti Awards celebrated nine bright girls who overcame India’s bottomless poverty with indomitable will.Some of their stories brought tears to our eyes
As the nine gritty young girls with dreams in their eyes stepped up to the stage to receive their Navjyoti awards from doctors,professors and media personalities,we were yanked right out of our smug,urban,middle-class world.
Video clips of their lives back home,showed them cooking on wood-fired chulahs,fetching water,helping around the house and lending a hand in the family trade.But we also saw them going to school and participating enthusiastically in its programmes.The gap between their circumstances and the dreams they spoke of seemed unbridgeable.Yet we hoped,even felt certain,that if they had come this far,they would go as far as they wished.
We were at the seventh annual Navjyoti Awards,instituted by UNICEF in collaboration with Doordarshan’s Sahyadri Channel.The nine award-winners,born into poverty with nothing but their indomitable wills and the encouragement of mothers,social workers and teachers to help them,were selected by local NGOs as role models for other girls like them.As one of the girls said wisely,”Financial help is not as important as moral support and encouragement.”
The girls came from regions in Maharashtra that don’t figure on our maps at all except occasionally as bad news.Pritilata Suravase came from Latur,the most famous of them all.Besides being Vilasrao Deshmukh’s turf,it was also the site of a major earthquake in 1993 and the place which has given its name,Latur Pattern,to a method of education that ensures consistently high results in the Board exams.
Kavita Ledange’s Chandrapur,and Gadchiroli where Sonali Gotame,a Madia tribal lives,are counted amongst the worst Naxal-affected areas in the State.Yavatmal and Washim in Vidarbha from where Bhumika Kumare and Sheetal Bhanchare came are known for farmer suicides.Humera Kazi came from Parbahni and Soni Kale from Jalna.Both districts are under threat of bomb attacks on Muslim places of worship.
Vandana More came from Nandurbar,which was in the news recently when one of its villagers,Ranjana Sonawane,became the first Indian citizen to get her 12-digit Unique Identification.But it will become even more famous when the world’s largest wind farm with an output of 1000MW,proposed to be constructed on a site 30 km away from Nandurbar city,comes up.
That leaves Priyanka Patil’s home district Sangli,a place close to the heart of every Marathi theatre lover.This is where the first play was written and staged by Vishnudas Bhave in 1843,inaugurating a tradition of professional theatre in Maharashtra that is 167 years old.
The stories of these nine girls are bittersweet.They come from poverty-stricken families.Three of them have alcoholic fathers.One father has abandoned the family and two have died.Sampada Jogalekar-Kulkarni,the compere,said of one of the girls,”Earlier she used to walk 8 km every day to school till she was given a bicycle.Now she cycles to school.”The girl said in her award-acceptance speech,”I rode the bicycle for ten days till it got stolen.So now I walk.”
Petite Humera Kazi told us with fire in her eyes that one of her dreams was to help uproot child marriages.Her mother had been married at 14 and Humera had seen how it affected a woman’s health and life.
Pritilata,who regularly wins cultural competitions at school,wants to become an actress;but is also determined to prove she is no less than boys by becoming a computer engineer.Some aspirations soared high,some stayed close to the ground.One girl wants to become a Collector,another,a teacher.”The teacher in our school doesn’t teach,so our children remain backward.I would like to help them.”
Some Navjyotis spoke like pros.Some stuttered,stumbled,wept,bringing tears to our eyes.But through it all,the spectre that darkened the brightly lit studio was of India’s shameful poverty.
* The winners bridged a gap between their extreme circumstances and the dreams they spoke of
* Sulabha Deshpande with one of the winners
* The winners stories were heartrending