Joomla! site syndication http://www.news.indicorps.org/magazine 2008-07-04T12:43:11+01:00 http://www.news.indicorps.org/magazine http://www.news.indicorps.org/magazine/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png text/html 2007-12-26T07:16:59+01:00 http://www.news.indicorps.org/magazine http://www.news.indicorps.org/magazine/content/view/56/32/ A cool wind swept through the community center that Sunday morning. Ahmedabad’s winter finally arrived, ushering in cozy sweaters, bright kites in the pale blue sky, and rare patches of warm sun. While I finished hand-washing my colossal load of laundry, fingers and feet numb, I could only wonder, “Will they come?” Optimistically, I put out the ten small sized matlos, earthen water vessels, I picked up earlier that morning, displayed a chalkboard, set up my i-tunes blazing laptop and began the wait. text/html 2007-12-26T07:08:47+01:00 http://www.news.indicorps.org/magazine http://www.news.indicorps.org/magazine/content/view/55/32/ Okay, so I’ve never been to Kansas, nor do I have any desire to go there. In fact, I’m in Ahmedabad, India for the next nine months. So “what is the point of referencing an old American classic like ‘The Wizard of Oz’?” you may ask. Patience, and I’ll get to the point. Being a volunteer working at the Sabarmati Gandhi Ashram, I’ve built up a fairly substantial repertoire of answers to the barrage of questions I get asked daily. Generally questions such as, “Did Gandhi actually live here?”, “When did he live here?”, “Why did he live here?”, “Where are the toilets?”. However, recently I was posed with a question that stopped me in my intellectual tracks; a question that I had no rehearsed answer to, nor had I ever given it any real thought. Up till now that is. And that seemingly simple question was “Where did Gandhi get his courage from?” text/html 2007-12-26T06:51:13+01:00 http://www.news.indicorps.org/magazine http://www.news.indicorps.org/magazine/content/view/54/32/ “So Bhavana…what do you want to be when you grow up?” I can’t tell you how many times I was asked that question as a child, and how much I loved it – for each time that I was asked, I had a different answer…an author, a doctor, a clown, a movie star, a plumber (yes, I actually wanted to be a plumber at one point.) It was only in college that I hated the question, because I hardly knew what I wanted to change my major to next, let alone what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But children, they love imagining what amazing things the future holds for them; they’re unafraid, with no limitations, nothing to hold them back. The world is theirs, and they know it, and they are forever ready to claim it. And if they’re not…well then, in my view, we have a problem.