It was not till I reached home last night, at 10.15 PM, driving slowly through the rain drenched (and pot holed and dimly lit too, I might add) streets of Bangalore, that I realised how tired I actually was. I stumbled through dinner and went to sleep, in my clothes. My wife had to wake me up, to change for the night. I was on my feet - or rather, I was kept on my feet - from 10 30 in the morning, to 8.30 in the evening. I was at a training for trainers programme, organised by the AAP in Bangalore. There were nearly 30 participants, who included amongst them Ms. Nina Nayak - Aam Aadmi Party and Ravi Krishna Reddy (for a short while), candidates for the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections in Bangalore. The participants included quiet, but enthusiastic students, experienced RTI activists and those who had campaigned for the party in the recent elections. There were teachers, lawyers, IT professionals and people who had quit their jobs to work for the party. What held them together was a passion to serve the people and a desire for changing the way things are run by the government. My task was to orient participants, so that they would be better prepared to be resource persons for a similar orientation course for party volunteers over the next few months. It is hoped that more than 1500 participants and volunteers would go through a twenty hour weekend programme, spread over two days, to give them an initial boost. The word training is completely wrong here. We are learning together. We are starting a long learning journey now. My task is just to ask questions, to trigger some thinking, to give people a kind of a framework in which they can fit their ample experience and possibly understand the larger context in which their understanding fits. I hope to help people channelise their passion into catalysing change. I started yesterday with a broad overview of where we stand, a kind of critique with a positive twist. While the overall challenges are many, the immediate one is to prepare for the BBMP elections. Keeping that in mind, we converted our energy into actionable points; things that we need to collectively address over the next few months. Then came the content sessions. We started with the absolute basics; a session on understanding what is a government and what it does, and then a history of how the local government system evolved in India. We had a short, late lunch break at 2.30 PM and plunged back into the sessions. On the basis of a vote, we took up the most boring subject first, which is the one of understanding the various levels of government. That was followed by a really animated session on bankrupt Bangalore, followed by one on the dynamics of peoples participation. We polished off the day with a session on understanding corruption. The pressure on me was un-relenting. I gave up sticking to any time schedule. If people were interested, I reckoned, we could go on as long as we wanted. From the moment that we started with pairs of people, (each one introducing the other) to playing a tiger and goat game at the very end (no secrets of what this game is will be revealed here - one needs to retain the surprise factor), the energy in the room was overwhelming. Anybody who thinks the AAP is wiped out is living in Lah lah land.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 08:12:29 +0000
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