Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog

Kolkata    Coming back from a day in Bhubaneswar (more on that to come), I kept checking the blackberry for reports from Vinod in Mumbai on the outcome of the ACORN India.  Finally, hitting the rain soaked and much weathered Kolkata airport, the reports were coming in.

      The numbers were on [...]

  Kolkata When my dad was still alive he always wanted to know the little, special things that made my work in other countries different and interesting, so from time to time in a new place or on a long trip, a small number of blogs became “notes to my father.”  Some [...]

Chennai    I waited for a meeting with leaders of various informal workers unions at the Harbour Workers’ Union building in the small bottom floor office of the CPI (Communist Party of India), one of a number of left parties that are in and out of the state and federal governments.  India is a different kind [...]

Chennai     Suresh, our Bangalore organizer, surprised me by coming over on the train to meet me in the afternoon on our rounds of Chennai.  We were walking through the central district “constituency” with M. Sampath.  Sampath had formally represented this area as a city councilor from the CPI (Communist [...]

Bangalore  The meetings are great.  The press conferences are important for the campaign.  All of that is true, but nothing beats the direct organizing — even with translation — that I have had the opportunity to do in more than a half-dozen informal worker communities of different types around this [...]

Bangalore Vinod Shetty of ACORN India and I joined members of the Farmers and Hawkers unions in Bangalore at the Press Club to release the conclusions of a survey report that our India FDI Watch Campaign had done in partnership with the large NGO, Action Aid.  Not surprisingly at least to us, [...]

Delhi  It wasn’t just the fact that there were maybe 50- 80 wastepicker workers there at the first conference and now there were close to 500 a year later at the 2nd conference.  It was more a sense that some maturity was coming into the organization, but not just that I [...]

Agra  The Taj Mahal is pretty amazing.  No argument there.  A massive mausoleum that has stood for over 350 years is a wonder, but it’s still a grave site when all is said and done.        There is a part of me that’s jaded.  Having seen a hundred pictures of something, the surprise [...]