Knocking Doors, Bringing Change

The way Enactus members live their lives can’t really be described with making allusions to the quotidian functioning of college students. For us, it has been different. Sometimes, in the middle of exams, we hop out of ours beds in the wee hours of morning and then get into a cab. Why? Because we need to go to Karnal, where the community under project Sattva is located, for demand assessments. We can't really put to words the feeling that drives us to do all this-it is something close to magic.

We met at the metro station, all set to seize the day. As the cab sped away, our eyes started getting laced by the residue of the previous night, and the rhythm of the speeding engine lulled everyone to sleep. As the morning light turned into the orange of afternoon and through windows, light and shadows took turns to dance subtly on our winter-bitten skins. Outside, we could see families of trees becoming familiar to our eyes because we travelled by road this often-almost ritually. We let the window down a bit, the wind broached our faces. This stillness was broken when the car stopped at the toll tax complex, we paid and sped by.

“Paneer ke aur doodh ke samples rakh lena aap, hum kuch aadhe ghante mei pahunch rahe hain”, Jaideep conveyed this to one of the didis from the dairy.

Karnal is a semi-urban district in the heart of Haryana, where one goes past the slums that thrive on the edges of Delhi and the private universities, to reach this place-it isn't lost in time or space-but it seems to have its own essence. Our Didis- the community in the two villages of Amritpur Kalan and Taprana- are still learning and actively participating in reclaiming what has been taken away from them. Our Kisan Sahyogis and the processor groups use the tools of modernity without displacing them from the roots- in our case, technology, tradition, profit-generation and altruism go hand in hand- making whatever we create (not produce) a labour of love.

We made a halt at and parted into pairs- Medha and Utkarsh headed to Amritpur Kalan, Jaideep and I- Taprana. A tempo's engine paused its half broken song.

Pushpa didi stepped out of the tempo and Jaideep walked out of the jeep. We had a lot of places to cover —  we juggled in the interstices between plan and execution. We got down at the Gymkhana Club and tested our luck — the mess manager wasn’t there but the disappointment at this finding didn’t cloud our hopes for long. Pushpa didi took a piece of paneer and gave it to her wailing son — he took it and began to nibble at it. Still brimming with enthusiasm, we decided to head to the next place in Sector -9. “Arrey, sun…”, someone called us as we decided to leave. He told us that there were a couple of women in the cafe and they might be interested in our products.

Enactus Members are inherently opportunists — so we agreed to talk to those women. We entered a room that was full of women with perfectly manicured nails, gaudy sequined attire and pricy purses.  They were playing Tambola. They were too busy (or too arrogant) to look at us.

“Who plays Tambola at 8 in the morning?” said Jaideep in a confused voice, just above a whisper.

I cleared my throat, and pitched our Project. Some women liked our products, and it was evident from their smiles. We exchanged contacts and then left satisfied. The flow of money in suburbs has changed the socio-cultural setup to an enormous extent. And this was an amazing example, women who would be in tatters working in a kitchen were now sitting here, in a club, early in the morning, all clad in imitation - designer clothing, playing Tambola, hundred and five hundred rupee notes spreading like cards about their fingers.

Next we visited a lot of schools, houses and shops. Didi was obviously tired, her baby’s eyes blinking theatrically by falling asleep and waking up under ceilings of different colours. The Sun was being pulled down by the unbearable weight of the afternoon, our bodies were tired but our spirits were still charged — after all, we had to ‘Seize the Day’.

“Ek aur school, bas didi, aap yeh saman mujhe pakrado, phir ghar chalte hai”, Jaideep told didi.

On our way to the last place, he kept on smiling at the baby, who was eating some potato chips.

Then we returned to Arpana Rural Services Organisation, and rolled back to Delhi. The clouds, looking as pure and brilliantly white as the milk, were hemmed to the horizon. We couldn’t wait to do this all over again. 

Written by Ilakshi and Meghna Jayaraj.
Edited by Rai Sengupta and Abhishek Naulakha