Special Camp 2017 Report: Day 2

The day commenced with the workshop of Dr. Manoj Khurana from Chinmaya Mission - Yuva Kendra on Transforming Indians to Transform India. Dr. Khurana carried forward the ideas of Patriotism by differentiating between the terms compromise and sacrifice so that young students develop a strong will power to choose sacrifice rather than petty compromises in their day to day lives. He also taught a formula to achieve transformation within our nation, that is, ACT where A stands for Appreciate the greatness of our country, C stands for be the Change, and T holds for transform and transform. A video depicting Indian Army with our National Anthem being played in the background filled my eyes with tears of pride and a fire to do something beneficial for my country. The real life story of Naib Subedar Bana Singh reinforced the respect for our soldiers who withstand the pains of minus degrees temperatures and selflessly work for the protection of civilians. The entire hall echoed with a silence which spoke of the REAL CHANGE in personalities of the students.

This was followed with the self defense training class by Mr. Dhananjay Tyagi who taught about ways to defend ourselves if someone tries to grab us from the back using elbows, head and hands. He also trained girls about very easy ways to save oneself if someone directly attacks us by grabbing one's neck. Definitely his style of training with doses of humour in between kept the session stimulating till the end. He emphasized upon practicing the methods on a regular basis in order to save oneself in real crisis. It was followed by a 10 minute break for refreshment and boarding of the buses by volunteers as per their groupsand projects to be taken up in the community.

The buses left for community work in various government schools to raise awareness about illiteracy, environment protection, Swachhta(cleanliness), women empowerment, heath and hygiene among slum and school students which is crucial for their healthy development. We interacted with a 13 year old girl of Kalyanpura school whose name is Sahiba Bano. A single child whose father works in a sanganer printing factory. The young adolescent unlike many students loves school and rarely misses any classes. Though good in all subjects she has a little fear of maths and faces problems in reading English texts. The Project undertaken by Group D is health and hygiene so the volunteers initially gathered more students like her and taught about PANCHTANTRA, i.e. five components of food ( Proteins, vitamins etc.) In order to develop further interest for knowing about causes and effects of bad hygiene, showed her an awareness video on you-tube entailing about causes of diarrhoea, need for community sanitation and use of toilets etc. The most important thing of our entire conversation was our talk on our dreams. Sahiba wants to become an IPS officer !!! That's the most astonishing answer from a 13 year old that we have heard so far. So we advised her to read newspaper daily and work hard to make her dreams alive one day with a strong willingness to help her with english.

This was followed by an hour break for lunch. The next session was of Ms. Tripti Pandey, Former Director of Rajasthan Tourism, who enlightened the students about the unique, vibrant and colourful culture of the state. She literally gave a reality check to all when no one in the audience knew all months of the hindi calender and famous culture traits of cities of Rajasthan and their relevance. She sang herself and even made teachers and students sing which acted like a live celebration of Indian culture.

Next was a Creativity Workshop on Best out of waste by wherein Monika Sharma and Aditi Vyas, two senior students from the Department of Fashion and Textile Technology and Fine Arts respectively demonstrated the making of flowers making using waste magazine and tissue papers. They also taught how to make photo frames using empty bottles, glass candle and best use of dry flowers etc. This activity was planned so that we could reuse the available resources to create better objects and not throw them away to add to the clutter and lead to environment pollution.

The day ended with the group discussion, script writing and practice of Nukkads of respective groups under the guidance of Theater Instructor Mr. Mahmood Ali, a Freelance Theatre Expert.