A journey to inner-self.

Contributor - Ruchil Kothar
Reflections from:Gramyamanthan 2017

Gramya manthan is a ten days rigorous program organized by Youth Alliance for exploring the life of the village while staying with the local communities. Gramya Manthan comes with workshops, discussions, and activities designed to nourish empathy and to facilitate reflection. This program began with an induction to develop a friendly atmosphere amongst the 30+ participants hailing from different backgrounds at Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad. The activities served as an icebreaker for someone introvert like me. Then we moved to the villages that suffered huge losses during the 2001 calamity in Kutch. We stayed there for 6 days with the rural community and then moved back to ESI for 2 days to reflect upon the learnings. Each day would begin with a morning circle where we mediated for 10mins and then reflected on what values we want to cultivate during the course of the day.

The activities could be classified among the following heads:
1. Workshop
2. Lectures
3. Deep thinking session

Each activity began with silence for 2 minutes. Since the program aimed at self-discovery through empathy, therefore, every session would end with an expression of thoughts triggered in the participant's mind after attending the session. The sessions had a profound impact on the way one thinks about life, work, and values. It was a profound experience where I experienced freedom from myself. I felt like a citizen of humanity not labeled to any prejudices. The program expanded my lenses to accommodate diversities in thoughts and at the same time stay rooted in one's own culture and beliefs. Most of the suffering in our life can be traced back to 'hatred' picked up from our perspective of a strong dislike towards some people, events, or places. This hatred grows like a parasite obscuring your eyes and heart from the beauty of this world. That beauty of one sharing daily meals with people from a different religion or washing someone else's dishes so that some other person could take his meal in it, or the beauty of discussing each other's life maps, trusting a whole new set of people or believing that some new unknown people will be there to hold you tight so that you don't fall but will push you as well so that you never stop moving forward. We discussed the System’s thinking, watched Nero’s guest, and applied design thinking to solve the problem faced by the rural community as a part of service-learning. Together we achieved what we couldn't have thought of as an individual. Such is a power of community bounded by love and compassion, worthy enough of being called as a Family. Respecting such a diversity never felt like a burden because we were not helping, we were not fixing each other rather we were serving each other to excavate the diamond out of the coal painted by society. We lost our labels of "engineers", "journalist", or "IITian" that are pre-defined by society's system and became free humans seeking work/lifestyle that would keep us happy and improve the people's lives. I learned how to unlearn. Everybody, right from birth teaches you how to learn, how to do one thing, or other. In life, it’s important to unlearn various things like hatred, close-mindedness, or being judgmental of others. I think if schools could incorporate such life-shaping practices in the curriculum instead of those boring moral science classes, we could get a better and wiser youth.

Thanks for the read! Sincere thanks to Youth Alliance for organizing such a beautiful immersion and giving shapes to the lives of Youth. You can find about the next edition here