Mumbai The road to organizational sustainability seems marked sometimes by the signposts of successful partnerships saying “go” and difficult ones saying “danger – warning!”  Talking with Vinod Shetty, director of ACORN India’s programs in Mumbai, which arguably has more experiences with partnerships of all varieties than any other ACORN International operation is always [...]]]>

Mumbai The road to organizational sustainability seems marked sometimes by the signposts of successful partnerships saying “go” and difficult ones saying “danger – warning!”  Talking with Vinod Shetty, director of ACORN India’s programs in Mumbai, which arguably has more experiences with partnerships of all varieties than any other ACORN International operation is always an exhilarating journey through the euphoria of possibilities ahead and the potholes of near misses behind us.

I’m wearing a t-shirt as I write this from one of our best partnerships, which has been the evolving relationship between ACORN India’s Dharavi Project among the ragpickers and – of all things – the Blue Frog jazz and supper club in Mumbai.  The t-shirt itself is good evidence of how such sharing works with Dharavi Rocks in big letters on the front with the Blue Frog symbol on the left and then on the back and the walking rag picker symbol on the back with ACORN India underneath.  Over the last year, every other month this has meant a “concert” or musical “workshop” in Dharavi and as frequently an invitation to the Blue Frog for some of our members where they also get to eat and sing.  Everybody’s interests are met.  The Blue Frog finds the visiting artists excited to participate and to get a better feeling of the “real” India and the notion of making a difference, and our members get a taste of the world outside of Dharavi and sometimes some real benefits in the mega-slum itself as well.  It’s easy to imagine this partnership growing.  Perhaps we could recycle all of the bottles and goods  they roll through at the Blue Frog, giving more work and better livelihood for some of our members?  Perhaps the Blue Frog starts making some contributions to our office and recycling center in Dharavi as well?  Who knows, but good things are coming here.

The American School has also been another success story in so many ways in another odd fellow pairing of this posh private school for Indian and foreign students.  Our rag pickers have done recycling programs for the students and invited them out to fairs in Dharavi where they have participated and volunteered.  Our members pick up recycling items from the school every week.  One of the teachers in a labor of love has now worked for almost two years to pull together a book on Dharavi with various writers whose sales will benefit ACORN India and the Dharavi Project (more on that in the future!).  The school has a director of volunteer programs (probably not the exact title) who is actually convening a coming meeting with all of the organizations like ourselves that the America School works with to make sure both parties are getting full value from the relationship.  We’ll be there!

Sometimes it’s simply harder.  I had traveled over with great hopes of finding that our waste pickers could collect carpet for InterfaceFLOR and this very “green” company’s work of making carpet  tiles from such recycled carpet.  This still might work, but given the heat and dust, tiles and terrazzo type flooring is common everywhere here that can be wiped down throughout the day rather than vacuumed.  Could we put enough volume together to make it work?  I will fly home with that as an open question.

And, sometimes it is lesson of ships moving in the night with good intentions going awry, which seems to have been the summary of our folks experience with Artefacturing, a project of artists, planners, and other, largely Americans, we worked with recently in Dharavi.   The visitors may have been happy, but our people had more fixed feelings.  Lack of care and security meant stuff was stolen, including school supplies from our recycling center that our members had been safeguarding.  Pictures in “art” mosaics made little sense to our members including them in some cases but also folks who had bitterly opposed the organization in the same tableau.  All of it became sort of a “rip and run” with less than a great taste remaining from the experience.  We never know, something good might still come of it all in the future.  We’re nothing if not cockeyed optimists, but when they didn’t even respect our hosting and good services enough to credit us in most of the press, even the ever charitable Vinod Shetty had trouble not admitting to being a bit miffed.

Would we do it again?  Sure, but differently!  We cannot achieve sustainability without partnerships and alliances, but we would be less than effective as organizers if we didn’t try to learn from all of these experiences how to model the good ones and modify the ones that left more scrapes and bruises than smiles and cheers.

with ACORN Inte

rnational and ACORN India’s organizing of the Dharavi Project with ragpickers in this huge mega-slum has been a partnership called “Dharavi Rocks” between our ACORN Foundation (India) and the Blue Frog jazz club in the central part of the city. Vinod [...]]]> Mumbai      One of the more unusual, and innovative, of the programs associated

with ACORN Inte

rnational
and ACORN India’s organizing of the Dharavi Project with ragpickers in this huge mega-slum has been a partnership called “Dharavi Rocks” between our ACORN Foundation (India) and the Blue Frog jazz club in the central part of the city. Vinod Shetty, ACORN’s director in Mumbai, was able to fashion the partnership out of the imagination and persistence of linking a friend of a friend of his brother (who also runs a new jazz club in Bangalore!) with one of the principals in the Blue Frog club which has become prominent in the music scene in the several years since in opened. The heart of the deal is that six times a year, the Blue Frog will provide the artists and ACORN will supply the audience and the venue in Dharavi. The idea had begun with a group of Tamil rappers and then advanced with the Blue Frog to include the Boxettes a lively women’s band from the UK and a Norwegian rapper when they visited the club, and the rest, as we say, is rock n’ roll!

Vinod is careful to give ample credit to the French-native who manages the club for having the energy and understanding of the impact, particularly on our young ragpickers, but also getting the fact that it would

resonate with some of the groups and artists the Blue Frog imports into the Bombay music scene particularly from the UK and Europe. There was no better example of this than the 90 minute musical workshop with about 40 of our kids that was put on by the well respected and highly talented saxophonist and rapper from Birmingham, England, Soweto Kinch.

Soweto’s musicianship, personality, and patience were on wonderful display at the Blue Frog

where the first
workshop was held. I wasn’t surprised though since UK-native Sue Crow, a great development volunteer for ACORN International, in a meeting the previous day was a huge gushing fan-girl of

Soweto Kinch and filled us in on his path from the councils (public housing) of

Birmingham to Cambridge and then his decision to move into music to connect and make a difference.

It was all great fun as Soweto blew the roof off with the sax and painstakingly with Vinod translating tirelessly moved our gang through various exercises designed to allow them to experience rhythm and appreciate how to make music with their feet, hands, and voices. It was a master’s course on rap in many ways given to our our crew of slum kids adept in the music and dance of Bollywood. Even after the workshop and without any common language Soweto continued to engage our guys in a form of universal communication which speaks volumes to the power of organizing just as it does music.

Soweto

The whole event was an unexpected treat for me on my last day in Mumbai before flying home. The manager asked me for pictures since all the professional photographers were shooting video, so I’ll have to hustle when I get back to the States to find some that are good enough for the Blue Frog and Soweto to share. And, as a final note, Soweto and I both were in Mumbai and both of us walked away with the t-shirt, his in red, mine in black: Dharavi Rocks!

Delhi       The fabrication of the Commonwealth Games continued. The headlines trumpeted six more gold medals and the 2nd place standing of India, while the stories continued to be nothing but mishap and misfortune due to poor organizing and faulty equipment, and literally no crowds at all. An [...]]]>

chaddis pink underwear campaign

Delhi       The fabrication of the Commonwealth Games continued. The headlines trumpeted six more gold medals and the 2nd place standing of India, while the stories continued to be nothing but mishap and misfortune due to poor organizing and faulty equipment, and literally no crowds at all. An automatic set of tire puncturing teeth didn’t read the electronic sticker and came up hurting 3 Ugandan dignitaries seriously. The courtesy driver fiasco continued for Tata Motors with the new spin being the fact they only got the contract signed in July, so it’s someone else’s fault of course. Wild speculation on why so few people are attending the games including the Times of India wondering if Delhi elites were so used to getting free passes that they were unwilling to pay to go to the game. Solution: the Delhi Municipal Corporation asked the Organizing Committee for free passes for school children and others to be able to fill the stands. What isn’t mirage continues to feel like farce here.

As a break from the Commonwealth Games Campaign (go to www.commonwealthgamescampaign.org to support the work), I spent a delightful couple of hours visiting with Mridula Koshy, a former SEIU and IAF organizer largely in the Portland, Oregon area who is now a well read author of short fiction and a coming novel living with her family in Delhi. I’ve told the story before in several places of stumbling onto her book of short stories while killing time in the domestic airport in Delhi before flying to Mumbai on my last visit. We’re publishing two of her stories in the coming two issues of Social Policy, which I’m quite excited about doing.

Mridula gave me the opportunity of not just talking about blanks in my understanding of India and organizing here, but also allowing me to test some of my suppositions and theories with someone with whom I shared a common language of organizing. Coming from her IAF experience with the redoubtable Dick Harmon, she made many suggestions about whether or not ACORN India could find “mediating institutions” that might help. Colleges and universities were one of our brainstorms and it resonated with our work in Mumbai and our organizers’ own histories of activism in Delhi, so that suggestion is high on the list of things to discuss with the staff in our next meetings. She also hit home with me by filling in a couple of Bollywood blanks particularly the social change focus on one of the more well know directors who has appeared in our YouTube blurbs to support the “Waste” documentary on our organizing in Dharavi and the ACORN India Trust and noting the way he was focusing on the college and university market for change as well.

She also brought into more vivid detail for me a campaign last year that I had been only to glad to join, but only dimly understood, and absolutely had missed gauged its power and focus. Prachee Sinha, who had worked with ACORN International, had sent me one of those Facebook, I think you should like things about the Gulabi Gang, the women of the Pink Sari’s protecting women. I had sped read through it, was glad to join, and saw something about a Pink Chaddi or Pink Underwear Campaign, assumed it was the same thing and went merrily along my journey through life and around the globe. Mridula helped me understand how much more there was to this Pink Chaddi movement as she told the story passionately and vividly.

She had had a fleeting early connection when one of the young organizers had called her out of the blue on the

Mridula

phone the night before going public with the campaign to ask for advice having heard she had once been a union organizer in the States. The campaign was organized in direct reaction to a right wing outfit (Sri Ram Sena) that had decided it was a serious cultural crime to date on Valentine’s Day, hold hands with boys in public, and so forth and had gone into a pub in Mangalore and beaten three women they suspected of such wild cavorting behavior. Our heroes upon hearing about this reacted viscerally and put out a call for supporters to mail and courier their pink underwear to the headquarters of Sri Ram Sena demanding they stop this nonsense. As shrewd organizers everywhere realize, if you can ever link sex and politics, something combustible can happen, and sure enough their movement went viral with huge response from people joining their Facebook site and women throughout India sending their many shades of pink uw’s to SRS headquarters. In other cities women did mass collections of underwear to courier over. More than 200 media outlets around the world picked up on the story, and the net result was that the SRS had to back off of its calls for a Valentine’s Day “massacre” of abuse to women. They also organized a site called the Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women with their tongues firmly in their cheeks which took off well and raised the flag for modernity and more importantly women’s rights.

The darker side of the story that Mridula shared as well included some women in Bangalore and elsewhere that were followed, driven off the road, and beaten, like old civil rights organizers in the South. These stories didn’t get the press because violence and politics is less entertaining than sex and politics.

Mridula’s tutorial made me thankful at finding a kindred spirit in Delhi. Another outsider from the foreign and outlaw sub-culture of organizers, writers, and aliens in all countries who I can now find on my semi-annual tour through India for a quiet moment of common language and reality checking which is always welcome on the road far from home.

The harder questions she asked focused on class, caste, and in fact “happiness” and her wonder and speculation that the working class might be actually happier in India than in the USA, even though as we talked about White Tiger, she wondered why more drivers and house servants didn’t rise up and kill their masters. We will both no doubt give that question much thought before I next return in the spring.