Thursday, February 12, 2009

Samvedana - The Genesis

Samvedana [saM-vedana ]= empathy, compassion, feeling others pain as if it is ours.

Hello (hypothetical) folks,

Few points to clear off any misconceptions about the title:

a) No, am not a messiah of JV shivir and I am not here to publicize it!
b) I am not being a Sanskrit teacher to teach you different Sanskrit ke \begin(HYD_HINDI) word-aan \end(HYD_HINDI)

Okay, with that in mind..

Samvedana is a dream combined with sincere wholehearted hope and effort to make it a reality.

huh.. So what is it??


"It is a group which is made of you and me and we all get our hearts and souls together by helping for the welfare of the society"

and how exactly do you want to do that?

+ We being IT empowered , we will act as a channel of information between NGOs and the junta.

+ We can be regular in our donations however small they might be (small but periodic) and divert this money to those NGOs which is not able to meet the demands of their basic amenities.

Why so "samajsevak" ??

Well... you see something, you experience something and few of those 'somethings' totally change your outlook. Samvedana sprung in my heart when I saw and experienced the most disturbing sight - a bomb blast in my very home - Hyderabad. It did not leave my family untouched. I lost my cousin to that mindless destruction. How long did I take to get over it? Not over it till now and I dont think I can ever be over it.

Before that incident, it was a very smooth and happy life - wasting bucket loads of water, electric power, money all of which we conveniently take for granted. They say, you need to "put yourself in others' shoes" and taste the pain to know how they feel like'. Seeing my aunt and uncle, I realized how it feels like not to have something which everybody has. And its not a very good feeling. The more miserable I was, the more time I started spending alone in the orphanages which was the only thing which made me happy.

So on Sept 8th, the day of awakening as I call it , I gave my GRE exam, there appeared a list of the universities to choose from. I had my very own list in mind - a 2 month effort which I obtained after a lot of searching and interacting with seniors etc etc. But then, it just stuck me, do I want to do this, or not? The 'no' side of me was so strong that I walked away without opting for a university thinking, well okay, let me think about it..

I thought for a while and then it became clear that I need to make my dream which was dormant in some corner of my mind a reality. So with immense support from my friends and family, 'Team Samvedana' came into existence.

Do you want to join Samvedana and help us in making this dream reality? We are now a team of 30 odd people working real hard on this. Do drop in a mail to me if you are interested!

Ending on a lighter note :P

Oh n btw 0 : If Yash Chopra starts a charity organization named samvedana , its caption would be "come fall in samvedana " :P (jees! how lame!)


Tata,
Deepti (On behalf of Team Samvedana)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Firstly congratulations for taking the initiative. Social entrepreneurship has interested me a lot too so i could relate a lot to this post. But for something as big as your venture i suggest you must be keeping another blog for it and not mixing it up with your personal blog.

PS Just an advice, would like to hear from you more in detail sometime about how things actually rolled on.

Deepti Ghadiyaram said...

@Bhanu You are quite right! All the other posts from now on will be on another blog.
We are planning to arrange for a presentation where we will brief our agenda this Saturday. We will be sending an official mail. Do attend it :)

Anonymous said...

Wonderful initiative! A number of people keep wanting to do this and never pick up the initiative which you have. Hats off, and all the best for your endeavors. Do keep all of us posted. I on a personal level will try to give whatever I can.

Unknown said...

Extraordinary Effort... Congrats... Will try to contribute...

Anonymous said...

Great! Here's wishing you all the luck you need :).

I will reply to your email in detail soon. There are at least a couple of existing initiatives, doing similar stuff. It could be quite beneficial to connect with them, and learn from their models/successes/failures.

Unlike a researcher, a social change agent can't insist on novelty :). Our criterion should always be the amount of positive impact. Going with that, it's perfectly okay to simply emulate the best practices of other NGOs, as long as you are reaching out to a newer set of beneficiaries.

You mentioned about some presentation. Who is it for?

I hope you are aware of AshaKiran, IIIT's other community intervention. We have now completely run out of volunteers in the health wing. Could you and like-minded friends help revive it? Do let me know should you need more info on what needs to be done.

Pulkit

SaiRam said...

Deepthi,
This is something which makes me feel happy. Having in mind to do some thing that adds value to the society is not a simple thing: It needs more commitment, perseverance. I had it my mind but the way I am implementing is rather haphazard. Your keenness and the way you put it in words impressed me and in fact will impress anyone. I'm sure those words will soon shape out into action. It is very encouraging to the today's society to have young people like you not just playing a blind watcher's role to what's happening around. The only suggestion I give you is to make the purpose more clear and keep it alive all through. My wishes will always be with those who try to create positive impact on society.

Dileep

JAI said...

from Oct to Feb i suppose now u kn wt u want to do after B.Tech. its good... nt u ..samvedana

Jay ho