Pankhudi Foundation Blog

On the occasion of Republic day, we decided to spend the whole evening with the children at Suman Nagar.
The entire class was jam-packed with over 70 kids turning up.
One of our senior batch students, Sanjeevani had prepared a speech about the importance of celebrating this day. Everyone listened with rapt attention as she listed the principles on which our Constitution stands and which were embraced by the Indian Democratic Republic on 26th Jan 1950.

A few of our student performed a dance item they had practiced to the song “Vande Mataram” by A.R.Rahman. One of our volunteers standing at the back overheard that this performance had won 1st place and a cash prize of Rs. 501 when they had recently performed it at a competition.

Our attempts at screening a movie, unfortunately were greeted with chaos in the audience. The movie chosen for the occasion was the animation film “Happy feet”. Even though it was a thought provoking movie, we started screening the English version which some of the smaller kids could not enjoy.

At the close of the events, we distributed sweets. It was our first event of the New year and with great enthusiasm all the assembled volunteers voted to make the next event an even bigger success.

Just a general update on everything that’s happening behind (and front of) the scenes in Pankhudi Delhi. Things are moving forward, a little slowly but steadily.

1. Health Camp: We’re planning to hold a general medical check up for our kids sometime over the next 3 weeks. We need a doctor, medicines and to create health cards for each kid.

2. English teacher: Aasmeen will be going on leave to study for her board exams soon, and we think someone experienced would show better results for our kids. Finding someone who can come to the slum for approx 2 hours everyday to teach the kids is proving to be a bit problematic. We’re presently looking at other NGOs and colleges to get leads.

3. Maths Content – We’re trying to evaluate the kids and make sure they are in the right groups plus set up a regular content cycle and evaluation process.

4. Volunteer trip – We’re trying to plan a trip to Amritsar for all the volunteers soon

5. Shelter – The shelter is up but it will need some patching up soon plus we need to make it feel like more of a classroom.

6. Pankhudi photo gallery – Krishan has taken the responsibility of constantly updating the gallery

7. Kids’ Schools – Some of our kids might benefit from switching to private school. We need to study their current schools and see what we can do to improve their education.

On 3rd Jan’10, we celebrated the New Year Twenty-Ten in a special way by having a formal inaugural of our own ~Pankhudi Powai office. We had an awesome experience.  It all started with cleaning & decorating the office with balloons, crap papers & flowers…large number of volunteers where present for this special I-DAY…white board was painted with the new colorful sketches depicting ~Pankhudi fragrance.. after an hour preparation the whole office was decorated by great work of all our enthusiast volunteers..

This special day was blessed by Auntyjee (Shahzad’s mother) & Mr. Mohan Wazir… Ribbon of the inauguration was cut by Auntyjee followed by the Cake-Cutting ceremony… Then after there was some  session happened, in which each one present had to state about his/her New Year’s Resolution…fantastic resolutions came from each n everyone…

Pankhudi Office Inauguration

Shahzad gave the brief history about the ~Pankhudi  inception; stating how small seed of thought started from an Orkut Community nurturered into current state of Pankhudi… Then there was a brief brainstorming about the future projects of Pankhudi… The whole function ended in 2 hours & all had lot of fun.

Abhishek Jha,
PR & Resource Representative,
Mumbai Chapter.