A bit of style does no harm to anyone, surely when it drops down on you as a gift. My association with my clothing has been 2 folds. As I was growing up, the gifts I received in terms of T-shirts and jeans was growing exponentially, with literally not able to wear them even once and just growing above that size. Having this concern, I declared that I don't need gifts anymore in frustration. Resulting practically no presents! Now that was really annoying. But it so happened that the idea of gifts in itself came to me as a pushing onto someone the things you believe would be liked by them. Simply leading to Quarrels with the growing up youth. And with time the cycle of exchanging things stopped...
It was in a matter of time when these things had to resume and gladly this time I was not growing anymore! But the idea of no gifts against me settled deep down and for me, I couldn't have gone against the previous me. The result was that I was excluded in this exchange of things until the day of reckoning came by. My elder sister gave a Louis Philippe T-shirt on my birthday, a pretty fancy one indeed and with the Punjabi gesture of no Price tag. Well my utility went into thousands and that became so dear to me that an entire year passed by and I could only wear it once, i.e. on my next birthday.
Taking a turn away from the usual set of affairs where I had enough to wear at least, I encountered communities which used to send their children out to play in loathes of mud with just an underwear. Their parents were afraid that they will have to spend a lot on washing the dirty clothes and that would take away time and money. Well this was a different place, something I saw for the first time. On top of that my early morning visits to the urban slums revealed thousands of people going to garbage areas, muddy lands, railway tracks and drains to defecate in the open. Morning till 5am used to be the women’s time and later in the day men could use the premise. These revelations were shocking.
But I had to do something and I along with a lot of my friends went forward taking the task of handling operations of Community Toilet Complexes. It was very difficult to convince communities, but we brought change agents, conducted workshops for students, sensitized women and trained people to be entrepreneurs, handling the complexes by themselves. This ultimately transformed into a movement and the sheer hygiene and cleanliness diverted huge masses towards these places of joy, safety and happiness. The journey did not stop there as we conducted health camps, ran initiatives for people towards banking, organized fun activities for the communities, celebrated festivals with them and it simply grew as a family, we called as Raahat. This initiative was fast adopted by a lot of NGO’s, governments from different states contacted us and the self-replicative model kept on growing, solving the basic need of Sanitation for thousands of slum dwellers.
