One little second past the 31st of December, 2014, a New Year will start. Fire works will sparkle in a sky above the street near my home where a little family of children sleeps, huddled under a soiled sheet.
Perhaps on that night, they will look up for a few seconds, marvel at the coloured flickers of light, or perhaps they’ll just pull their sheet around them a little tighter.
They know how to sleep despite noise, the hard surface of the pavement, the chill in the December air. How will their little lives be different in 2015?
It is a question that haunts me. What will it take to enable every child in India to reach his or her greatest potential? How will I pick up the newspaper and not shudder at the thought of starting my morning with images of child brutality and teenage suicide? How will this year be different? Will this year be different?
When I’m unsure of how to answer a complex, overwhelming question, I remember that a good place to start seems to be with myself.
What will I do to make this year different for children? Yes, the government has a role to play. Yes, the new Companies Act asking companies to give 2 per cent of profit to charity needs to kick in.
Yes, NGOs will play their part. But perhaps what will make this year different isn’t any of that. Perhaps what will make this year different is what I will do. Perhaps in answering this question for myself, I’ll determine whether 2015 will look different for that child on the street.
A few months ago, I met Kailashji, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, at his home for children just outside Jaipur.
I remember the welcome of his gentle smile, his wife’s generous hospitality, the unfiltered laughter of the children who crowded around us.
I remember sitting in a circle with a group of his children, hearing the story of a child who had been rescued from a landmine when he was 10, who had seen his friend get crushed to death while he escaped, who today was confident, educated and had just returned from a conference in Geneva where he advocated child rights.
At the end of our circle time, he looked at our group and said, “What will each of you do for children?” Simple, pointed, urgent. Kailashji had clearly asked himself the same question through decades of the work of rescuing, child by child, over 30,000 children.
On the other side of the world, Indian-American rapper Nimesh Patel, who we affectionately call Nimo, left the attention that his band Karmacy generated to move to Ahmedabad, where he felt moved to work on the musical Ekatva with a group of 16 children who lived in one of the city’s sprawling communities.
A world where people felt connected as one was important to Nimo, and so he lived a process of understanding what unity meant through the experience of Ekatva.
Nimo went on to write music on values that mirrored a world he wanted to see, and his songs Grateful, Being Kind, and Planting Seeds made their way virally around the world, leading to an “Empty Hands” tour that has touched hundreds of thousands of people, reminding them of our power to be good, and do good.
Kailash didn’t set out on his journey to get the Nobel prize; Nimo didn’t write songs to see them reach the far corners of the world. They both simply felt, called to do something themselves. One step led to the next.
So, what will I do? This year, I’ll try to live three values: Courage, compassion and wisdom. I will try to be braver, to love more, to think more deeply.
I will make the little moments matter, stopping to talk to the little children on my street corner, finding joy in the little things around me and using that joy to tackle and break down the complex challenges that define our current education system.
This year, I’ll have even more conviction in the idea of building a movement of committed, skilled people focused on getting an excellent education to all children.
I will do what I can, each and every day, to inspire more people to do more for children from saying a kind word to a struggling child to joining the Teach For India Fellowship and committing to two years of teaching in an under-served classroom and a lifetime of work for equity in education.
2015 is an invitation to each of us to be a part of a vision of an India that is a sum of our collective potential. Each of us can play our part, we just need to ask whether we will.
I ask that when we consider asking this to ourselves, we keep the vision of a really new India a bolder, brighter, kinder India, in mind. That India is worth us feeling a little more, doing a little more, and being a little more in the New Year.
Shaheen Mistri is the founder and CEO of Teach For India and the Akanksha Foundation, a non-profit organisation
