It’s the season of festivity and good cheer, so I’m going to tell you a story that really lit up my mood last week.
Ranjeet came to me the other day, gangly as only eighteen-year-olds can be, dressed in skinny jeans and a fashionable tee shirt. With his backpack and fancy sneakers, he looked pretty much like any youngster you might come across in a college canteen or a shopping mall. There was, however, a difference. It’s just that one needed to look carefully for it.
His backpack contained pretty much what he possessed in the world. And unlike the swagger of a teen who knows he has a family and parents to go home to, Ranjeet’s confident strut was born out of something entirely different. For just over ten years ago, this youngster lived alone on the mean streets of Delhi. Surrounded by other children undergoing the same sort of degradation and abuse everyday, he (like many other children who live off the street) began to believe that this was what life was like.
However, circumstances brought Ranjeet to Karm Marg, a centre for street kids. He realised that there was another way to live, that his life needed to change. “Here I got the chance to study, improve my life. I found friends and mentors. If it weren’t for Karm Marg, I don’t know where I would have been today,” said he.
After spending the next ten years of his life in Karm Marg, he was deemed old enough to make his own way in the world. “I found a job with a job with a paper manufacturer and exporter,” said he, “it was such a heady feeling to earn my own money!” But while he enjoyed being able to buy himself new clothes and other little luxuries, Ranjeet was always conscious of how far he had managed to travel in life.
“I knew that Karm Marg would always be a part of me, like a family. And whenever I went back to visit, I’d make sure I counselled the younger kids, spent time with them,” said he. This made Ranjeet realise that he was able to understand his friends in Karm Marg a lot better than educators or social activists did. “I knew what sorts of thoughts danced in their heads, because the same thoughts had once come to me too,” said he simply. That his experiences on the street would ever stand him in good stead had never occurred to Ranjeet. But he found that shared histories with the younger members of Karm Marg helped him connect with them better.
“For the last few months, I had been thinking of learning skills to enable me to work with young adults,” said he, “I wanted to do this not just to give something back to the people who gave my life new direction — but also because this was what I really wanted to do. ” So when he heard about a six month course in an NGO that focused on teaching skills and various methods of vocational training, Ranjeet jumped at the chance.
When he came to meet me that day, he was leaving to join the course in a couple of days. Although he was clearly nervous (people like you and I would never understand how sheltered street kids can feel once they start living in places like Karm Marg), he was also very excited. “This is the first time I’m going to be totally on my own — it’s my chance to prove myself,” said he.
I wished him luck as he set off on his adventure, wishing more hard luck stories had such happy endings…Or, in his case, beginnings.
