What are words worth?

We've all experienced the feeling. You're at a point when you think there is just no hope for us Indians; there is just too much poverty, too big a social and economic gap between sections of society, and just too little political commitment to set things right. There are too many cars on the road, too little public transport, too many potholes on the roads and too few spaces that allow safe transit for pedestrians. The lines are too long, people push too hard. Competition everywhere, from the classroom to the ticket counter at the railway station. The big picture is just too hard to take. And so we retreat to our little islands, in front of our television screens and computer monitors, into the even tinier interfaces of our mobile devices, playing games and being social in new and different ways. Pull back, long shot, no getting away from it, we still need to negotiate the big bad world and all the people in it. So we set out each morning convinced that we're going to e

Ja (right) with Maxine, at the Alternative Network meeting, 2004 I opened the newspaper this morning and way down at the bottom of page five was a small insert in remembrance of an old friend and sometime mentor, Janaki Iyer, known simply as "Ja" to many of us.  I myself took a decade or more to make the transition from "Mrs Iyer" to "Janaki" to a very hesitant "Ja"--the diminutive seemed not to do justice to a woman who in a very gentle and quiet way had touched so many people, young, old, and like myself, somewhere in between. First, the specifics. Janaki was a teacher from start to finish. After many years of teaching in an upscale Bombay school, she moved to Hyderabad and, with an enthusiastic friend, started Ananda Bharati, a learning space for children of migrant labourers, in a small room in the YMCA, Tarnaka. Many of those children went on to join the mainstream school system and complete their secondary education; a few even obtai