MITRA thoughts

Sometimes in life you don’t really get the bigger picture of why you are doing something until after its done. You get stuck with the flow and somewhere in the middle you think why am I doing this work? It is not going to mean a thing to anyone a few days after its done, right? So why do it? I thought CSR was one such thing…

CSR… Corporate Social Responsibility was a new term for me when I joined my first job. After all, who talks in terms of CSR in the normal world? It was just another management lingo for community service. And the more I heard about it, the less I liked it. It was just another platform for the big companies to do their branding. Hold a banner printed for a pittance of their salary saying Green Walk or World peace and other such high sounding terms, walk around the busiest street you can get in the city, put as many people into inconvenience holding up traffic as you can and BAM! There comes your name with photo attached in the next day’s paper and you get all the branding you want without spending a paise.

Well, that was CSR for me, and I used to stare into my screen hard when someone came along looking for ‘volunteers’ to join their Peace walk, hoping they would think I am busy. what good it would do, my Walking in the sun with a placard over my head, which I am supposed to be holding up to bring about peace I do not know. Until, MITRA.

MITRA was born right before my eyes. MITRA is a village adoption program.

Huh? We were talking about ‘adopting’ a village to make it go green. In true sense, all we really wanted to do was get some land to plant some trees on. But after some time of pushing ideas around, everyone felt that it was adopting we were talking about, it had to be full-blown. Adopt the village, it’s people, every house and every tree. When we started thinking about it that way, the village was our oyster. So the guys from the tree-planting foundation found us this nice village near Red hills and my friends and I set out to take a look at ‘our’ village.

Now since all the villages I had been to had miles of green fields and wells and a hut here and there, I couldn’t really be blamed if that was I expected to see. But enter the area and nothing. I kept looking around for a ‘village’ standing in it!
But it turned out that that village had it’s own needs, surrounded by industries as it was. Our first activity there was a medical camp conducted in the local school. With of course, the tree planting and a round of data collection about it’s people. The fire in our company to be a part of MITRA was amazing. I still cant understand how people want to come and spend a day in the sun. But that’s how it is.

Activity Two was a distribution of uniforms, school bags and footwear to the kids in the school. Once again, I was miffed at the number of people who wanted to come with us. After all, it was a Friday and its not so easy to cut a day of work, they being billable to the client and everything.

But it still happened.

And the kids were so great. With their enthusiastic reception, and eagerness to get us to gulp sodas and arrange benches and chairs.

The way they smiled, with their shy but sweet faces, hands clutching their bags. The way they all crowded sound you for a snap, the way they took care of us, the way they brought their parents to meet us.

We went there to serve, but we were the ones served.
We went to put a smile on their faces, but we were the ones left smiling broader in the end.

He wants to be first, let him be the last - Luke 22: 26