Mumbai: Amitabh Bachchan is one of the few Bollywood celebrities with a heart of gold. The actor recently got in touch with ‘Dharavi Rocks’, a joint educational project between Acorn Foundation, an NGO working for the welfare of slum children and waste collectors/ ragpickers.
The team believes in giving slum kids a voice by initiating them into music, bringing positive and happy creative experiences into their lives and crating a bond between communities.
The band was eager to perform for the megastar, and he therefore invited the band to his residence where they set up their instruments(plastic water drums, pieces of garbage wood, old bottles, tins of wasted material stuck together with tape and string) and put up a great performance.
Amitabh Bachchan who shares anecdotes from his everyday life of his on his blog posted several pictures with the youngsters, and wrote, “They are the ‘rag pickers’ inhabiting one of the largest slums in the World, DHARAVI .. situated here in this metropolis, this Capital of capitalists and capital .. the Financial city of the country ..
They were all rag pickers and then someone brave and just and care, gave them music .. their equipment were the plastic water drums, pieces of garbage wood, old bottles, tins of wasted material stuck together with tape and string .. to create the most coordinated music ..
They came over to meet me and to display their skill .. they are impressive and filled with great energy and desire .. ambition and need to change perhaps their living environment and be one with the rest of the world .. so inspiring their effort and the efforts of those that spent their time to bring them out of their rather morose life and gave them sound and music … a music which they now perhaps shall take away to another land another country ..
These young .. these merry few, these band of brothers .. who have never travelled out of the slum, now travel out of the city for performances .. never been out never travelled by any mean and when they came to learn that they were to travel by plane, they gave vent to their enthusiasm with screams of joy .. ad then suddenly went very sad and quiet .. when asked what had happened, they said they were to go to Delhi by plane but how would they .. they ‘had no passports’ they said ..
Dear me … for them plane travel was looked upon as such a luxury, they felt and believed that only those that had passports could travel by air .. !!”
