 "The splendid journey of Udayan Care and the tragic story behind it")
Sometimes you discover more about a loved one once they are gone than while they are around you. That’s what happened with Kiran Modi, the founder of Udayan Care, when she tragically lost her 21-year-old son Udayan in an accident while he was studying in the US.
While going through his personal effects and papers, Modi found that her young son, living alone and studying, was supporting the lives and education of poor children in Africa through his allowance and by taking up part-time jobs. He didn’t get that much, yet a part of it was going to these children.
It felt like her son was sending her a message. He didn’t have to be there to deliver it. How many students who go overseas to study spend a proportion of their allowance to help unknown children in another part of the world – a world they have never seen, experienced or understood? How many would take up part-time jobs to fund someone else? He had enough empathy and a heart large enough to support these children from his not-so-generous allowance. It spoke volumes.
In that instant, she effectively made up her mind that she would do something “worthwhile” for children. That in a sense is when Udayan Care came into existence – still just a tiny seed in her torn and heartbroken state but one that had been sown.
We are sitting in her small office in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar. I have been hearing about Udayan Care for years now – several people I know are associated with it in some way or the other. The more committed are dedicated and involved mentor parents and are responsible for 10-20 lives, some donate to it on a regular basis and others are more loosely associated.
Modi, now 64, began her story relating how influenced she was by her grandfather who was her “role model”– a rags to riches story of an illiterate man with high moral standards and ethics who made his fortune in rubber and salt in Kolkata with sheer grit and determination.
Raised in a traditional Marwari family where women were expected to look good, produce children and look after family - none of which Modi found she could take lying down - her family wanted her to marry at 18-19 – what they considered the right age for a girl to settle down, but defiance came more naturally to her. She insisted marriage would interfere with her studies and wasn’t her cup of tea.
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But before he passed away, her grandfather whom she held in high esteem extracted a promise from the rebellious 17-year-old. She would marry but into a progressive family that allowed her to continue her studies and pursue her goals whatever they may be.
That’s how she found herself married into the Modi family from Modinagar – a family that itself believed in education. Her mother-in-law set her fears to rest by reiterating that she herself wanted an educated daughter-in-law.
Despite getting married at 18, true to their word, nobody stopped Modi from pursuing her studies. She did her graduation, had her first child, continued to study for a post-graduate degree and then had a second child. But none of this stopped her from finishing her PhD in American literature from IIT-Delhi.
She says she also learnt a lot from the joint family way of life (when she married she lived with close to 100 people in the house!). The system has many more redeeming qualities than people assume. Above all, it teaches you to respect each person and their space, to learn from each one and to learn to negotiate like nothing else can teach you.
Not one to just sit around, she and her thesis supervisor at IIT Delhi started a Saturday tabloid Neighbourhood Star of local going-ons in her area, a kind of local weekender funded by local businesses. She ran the paper for 12 years and says she gave it everything.
Her children meanwhile grew up and her older son went overseas for further study and this is when the train of her story comes to a grinding stop. “That’s when life took a backseat - he met with an accident in the US and passed away. He was 21…his name was Udayan.”
She halts, her voice breaking. Her eyes are full of pain. I too am shell-shocked. I can feel tears pricking my own eyes. I have two children of my own. Can anything crueller happen to anyone? What had she done to deserve this? Why, I think to myself, are some of the best things born out of someone else’s pain? She’s saved, shaped and salvaged so many children’s lives. But hasn’t she paid a very heavy price to do it? My own mind is a whirlpool of strange and random thoughts.
I untangle my own thoughts and bring her back to the story. That’s when Modi decided to set up Udayan Care, a trust for orphan and vulnerable children in his memory. She felt she had been “chosen” to do it.
She doesn’t know where she found the courage and strength at that low point of her life but she did. Within four months, in February1994, she started a small home for orphans after having visited many orphanages. “What I realized is that children who go into orphanages remain orphans. They never get a sense of belonging and are not brought up the way children ought to be.” So she decided that her model would be a blend of foster care and an orphanage. The children would not stay in a large indifferent space with no sense of belonging.
Udayan Care takes up apartments in blocks where other families live. Ten-twelve children live in the apartment with two caregivers; it also has independent small houses. This gives the children a sense of belonging and of being rooted to a particular place. They live in a community, play in the compound or neighbourhood park like children from all the other families, attend school and live like any other child in a regular set-up.
In addition for guidance, every group of children have 3-5 mentor parents (all volunteers) who are involved with the lives of the children, committed for life to them. Together they take on the charge of running the home. The children are typically between 6-18 years.
Currently, close to 180 children stay in their 14 homes with 36 mentor parents. But over the years they have touched the lives of close to 700-800 children (some are short term and they re-integrate into their families). The homes are in NCR, Jaipur and Kurukshetra as of now and three new homes are being set up in this year.
They have started two after care programmes for their children who are over 18. “We find an 18-year-old needs as much support and care. Just because they touch 18 doesn’t mean they are ready to manage the world entirely on their own,” argues Modi. Many of their children go into college: a girl who is now with NIFT, another boy is a corporate lawyer. One of their girls is a script-writer in the television industry. Two Udayan Care girls are studying on 100 per cent scholarship at Ashoka University in Sonepat.
The children are often abandoned due to poverty, cases where parents have died or the family is dysfunctional. Often the children who come to Udayan Care have been emotionally and psychologically battered. These scars are harder to deal with. Girls often have dealt with regular and sustained sexual abuse from their own family members at ages as young as 6 and 7. “They often come to us in a precarious state of mind,” explains Modi. It can take months and even years for these wounds to heal.
In addition to the Udayan Ghars and the LIFE (Living In Family Environment) strategy, Udayan Care in 2002 started the Shalini Fellowship programme for girls who are in their own family set-ups but the families are dysfunctional or at times the girls are not given any importance compared to their brothers and their education is compromised. The organization now works with just over 6,000 girls from government schools across 19 cities in India. Every city has its own volunteer group, as a core committee, with one or two employees, who raise funds locally and find volunteers who are willing to give their time and energy to the Shalini fellows. Both monetary and mentoring support is provided to each girl. The girls are given Rs 10,000 while in school a year and can use it to support their studies, do tuitions or any other course they want to pursue. Workshops on child rights, women’s rights, life skills, career counseling and possible vocations are held for them every Sunday across cities. Each girl is assigned her own mentor who she can always turn to for any advise. It helps them complete their school education and go on to study further if they so desire. In 2018-19, new Shalini chapters are to be started in Thane, Bangalore, Vadodara and Mandi.
Fifteen vocational training and digital learning centers have also been opened by the organization over the years to cater to the needs of both their children and the youth in different communities. These allow the youth to learn computer and digital skills, as well as other vocational and employability skills required to survive and thrive in today’s world.
As we chat, one of her colleagues walks in with a box. She opens it to reveal an attractive kundan set donated by someone for one of the Udayan Care girls who is getting married over the next few days. There’s a mehndi ceremony, a sangeet and the wedding ceremony. The arrangements are made and financed by Udayan Care. Twenty-two of their children have been married off and they have 25 grandchildren in the family. Two marriages were on the brink of failure and the mentor parents were able to salvage both after counseling the boy and the girl. Girls are usually supported by their mentors even after they have children. The mentor parent typically gets so involved in their lives that they come to look upon them as their own. So the relationship stays.
Usually many mentor parents have finished with parenting their own children and join Udayan Care when they face the empty nest syndrome. But there have been exceptions like Aneesha Wadhwa who quit her job with Discovery channel at 27 and became the youngest mentor mother almost 15 years ago. She has since “produced” 27 daughters and is now on the board of Udayan Care. Her own 11-year-old son teases her that her 27 daughters are more likely to look after her in her old age than he is!
Aneesh Wadhwa, a mentor parent with her girls
Modi says many of her mentor parents – Madhu Gupta, Dolly Anand and Isabel Sahni - have been with her almost since inception and have already “produced” three generations of children. Deepak Sharma, a mentor father, left his job with Tata Teleservices at 53 and has been working on a voluntary basis with them ever since. She says almost all her mentor parents say that they have got more from the relationship than they have given.
This is true for Modi as well. Other than the pure joy of seeing changed lives over the last 25 years, she can look herself in a mirror and knows that if Udayan were alive today, he’d be very proud of what his mother has achieved in his name and memory.
As our chat draws to an end, with great pride and total joy, she invites me to attend the wedding. My hectic schedule, I know, will not allow me to be there but this is one wedding I would really have liked to witness. A young girl with little hope for the future transformed into a young girl with a future full of hope.