Updates @ Ananya

The team from Sugathi that has gone to Ananya on 26th Jan,2008 comprised Pardha , Gunashekar , Pavan , Kishore ,Venk (Our Venkata Sunil), Srinivas( Srinath's colleague a new face in Sugathi's core team ) , Aparna & myself.

Actually the day started quite early for me as I reached there an hour before the other guyz ,who got delayed at the bakery. I was lucky to be entertained with a good session of cricket. I was mesmerized at the way these kids batted and fielded and the way one of those kids displayed good footwork and this shows how technically somebody could learn and improve by just watching the television.

Then Uddhav came along and started talking about the day's agenda. As we ran through the agenda, topics changed and the conversation widened , then he started telling me about a session he attended a week earlier where "how NGOs need to raise money" was discussed at length. The session it seems has not given a straight cut answer to the question but it has instituted the process of thinking in everyone's brain. This goes to suggest what a big and attractive sector the Social Service has become, how else could there be so much analysis done on something that doesnt fetch profits? We see a paradigm change in this sector. TISS is now one of the hottest colleges in India for an MBA. On a lighter note he said that he respected the decision of our stopping to donate money to Ananya but said that if the same was today he would have taken steps to prevent our withdrawing as an assignment to the discussion that happened.

The kids have taken part in the Mumbai Marathon which has been in the news recently thanks to stars like John Abraham , Bipasha Basu . One of those kids ran for 17.5 kms in 1hr45mins. Uddhav also ran (I mean walked) in the marathon. This was one of their efforts to raise money.

The rest of the team then arrived and we started to get on with the rest of the activities that were planned for the day.

The theme for the day was " Science " and for demonstrating that we had the children of the school divide into their groups and each group was supposed to draw or paint or make a model of any science topic that they could come up with and explain the process behind it to the whole class and us(Sugathi members).

We and the class were asked to put forth our questions and the questions were to be answered by the respective teams.

There were 5 groups in all and the topics that were demonstrated are : -
1) Digestive System
2) Respiratory System
3) A Butterfly's metamorphosis
4) Photosynthesis
5) A fatory's living model

All the groups were very innovative. We could see creativity oozing out from the brains of the kids in the form of using baloons to resemble the stomach, liver etc and pasting sand on paper to denote the size of the food particles that enter the intestines etc. One of the groups even had a demonstration in an interactive manner ,
where one of the members of their team asked a question and another answered it , this way they made sure the demonstration was more interactive than how it would be in a regular presentation.

Finally when it was our time to show them something we demonstrated the Newton's Third Law - "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction". We blowed up a baloon and stuck it in the direction of the exhaust of a small car and when we let loose of the baloon the car moved in the forward direction which was a result of the thrust created by the air rushing out of the baloon.

With this came to an end an activity which can easily be touted the best and the most challenging activity conducted by Sugathi at Ananya to date. The key to this is that it could focus on enhancing the expressive talent of the kids. We as a team should definitely be proud of the way the activity has gone by . 3 cheers once again to Sugathi . Hip , hip , hurrah!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hope Sugathi does many more activities of such kind.

Please find the pictures of the :-
http://picasaweb.google.com/sugathi4all/ScienceFairAtAnanya26thJan08