THE TALE OF THREE BROTHERS

This should have been the tale of five brothers, much like the mythological Pandavas (except that they had two sisters too). They even had a step-brother (like Karna, the half-brother of the Pandavas). But here, I will restrict it to three of them. The trio had a lot in common – all the three are very outgoing, extremely warm and helpful, caring, love children and music. Each one of them have very special skills. The eldest, Ilango, can write plays, choreograph and compose folk songs. The next in line, Ramesh, is quite an all-rounder, adept at electric repairing, carpentry, plumbing, driving and many other skills. Sundar, the youngest, is more similar to Ramesh and is probably as good as Ramesh in most of the skills, except that he can also handle computers quite well. All the three barely had a proper formal education beyond their 10^th class. Ilango, being more academically inclined, pursued his studies intermittently through evening classes and distance education, to eventually obtain a Masters degree. Ilango is in his early fifties, Ramesh in his early forties and Sundar is just turning to be 40 this year. All the three are married and have children. Ilango is now a grandfather. So, what’s the story of their lives ?

Ilango, being the oldest, still has vivid memories of their childhood. Theirs was a riches-to-rags story. Ilango’s father, R, was a widower who married Ilango’s mother a few years after the death of his first wife, from whom he had a son. Ilango’s sister preceded him in coming to this world. He was followed by four brothers and a sister. Sundar was the youngest of the lot.

Their father, R, was quite a well known person in Madurai. He was very active in the then flourishing Tamil theatre, before Tamil cinema snuffed out competition from the theatre. His father wrote plays and directed them, many of which ran to packed houses. His father, a strong Congress supporter, was also known as a speech writer for prominent Tamil Congressmen in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Ilango remembers that his huge house, symbolic of their prosperity, was always filled with people from the fields of theatre and politics. His mother had a tough time in extending hospitality to all those who came to meet his father. As his father’s popularity increased, he was also asked to be the scriptwriter for a Tamil film. They led quite an extravagant lifestyle. Food and clothing was aplenty and never a cause for concern. Though from a goldsmith family, many of whom had thriving businesses, Ilango’s father did not consider taking up his traditional occupation, for what he did gave him a lot of satisfaction, fame and popularity.

Things changed all of a sudden with the demise of Ilango’s father. Life came to standstill for this family. His mother, who had spent most of her time within the four walls of the house, looking after a large family and the numerous guests, was at crossroads. Bringing up seven of her own children and a stepson for someone who had no formal education and who had no experience of managing money was a huge uphill task. Soon on hearing about his father’s demise, Ilango remembers people queuing up asking for the loans they claimed they had extended to his father. It was impossible for a widow to stave them off. With the help of some family friends, she sold the house and most of their material possessions to pay off the family debts, while trying to reconstruct life for the family. Sundar and Ramesh barely remember those days. Ilango himself had just then stepped into his adolescence.

The following years were marked with struggle for survival. Even with plenty of family friends and relatives around, the going was not easy, for when it came to money, there was not much help that was forthcoming. Their mother did a variety of odd jobs and errands to keep the family from starvation. She also tried her hand at petty businesses. Ilango started working as a helper in some shops that one of his father’s friends was familiar with. Between him and his mother, they ensured that the younger siblings went to school.

But the struggle for survival was taking its toll on Ilango’s mother’s health. She became increasingly weak with constant attacks of fever and cough. She started losing weight. Eventually, she was diagnosed as suffering from the dreaded tuberculosis. With hardly any money for good medical treatment, she was admitted to the district government hospital in Madurai. She could not hold on for long. Ilango was eighteen when his mother died and Sundar, the youngest was only six. Arranging a decent cremation was itself a huge task. The owner of the rented house they lived in refused to let them bring his mother’s dead body inside the house for the last rites. They finally had to take her body to a family friend’s house with great difficulty. The years of struggle and his mother’s illness meant that they were left with hardly any material possession, having had to sell most of their meagre possessions to survive. A little bit of cash and tiny pieces of gold ornaments that their mother had carefully kept aside had come in handy for their elder sister’s marriage. The burden of taking care of his four younger brothers and a sister was now squarely on Ilango’s frail shoulders. Determined though he was to ensure that his siblings could continue their education, he was quite overwhelmed by the challenge.

As he looked around for opportunities, he came across Boys’ Village, a home for orphaned and destitute children in Madurai district. Ilango got his younger brothers admitted as boarders in the village. That was a great relief. All children from the boys’ village went to the local government school, which meant that his brothers could continue with their education. When they grew older, they would graduate to Boys’ Town, where, in addition to their formal education, they could also get a formal training in various vocational skills that would ensure that they could identify appropriate livelihood options. Ilango himself managed to find himself the job of a typist in the Boys’ Town and with that earning, he could take care of his sister (who would eventually qualify as a teacher). Ramesh and Sundar learnt various skills – carpentry, electric wiring, lathe machinery etc., adept as they were with their hands. Ilango, in addition to his typing, got involved with the programmes. His love for children meant that he would often spend time teaching the children, playing with them and engaging them with various hobbies, music and singing being his favourite.

Ilango continued to develop himself. He got seriously involved with education programmes. He read voraciously to develop insights into child psychology and other dimensions of education. He enrolled himself for various training opportunities that came his way, which Boys’ Town was willing to sponsor. When Bro. Kimpton set up Reaching the Unreached (RTU) as an independent organisation, moving away from his base in Boys’ Village in the early eighties, Ilango joined him and helped him with various administrative functions. He moved on to initiate RTU’s education programmes and eventually headed the department, which, in a decade’s time, provided quality education to over 2,000 children, in addition to imparting vocational skills to adolescent girls and boys. Some of the vocations included the more modern ones such as screen printing and computers. All this time, Ilango continued to enrich his academic base, enrolled himself for various distance education courses and obtained a Masters in Sociology.

Ilango’s brothers chartered their own course. Ramesh joined one of the local contractors and worked as an electrician, plumber, motor mechanic and carpenter, all rolled in one. His cheerful disposition, his deft skills and his athleticism made him a very popular person. He was especially popular with the children in the foster homes which he would often visit to check on maintenance works. Like Ilango, he too was very fond of children and had a very special way of getting along with them. Moreover, he was a good singer and could play percussion instruments quite well and that ensured that he was always there to participate in various entertainment programmes (which invariably would be co-ordinated or conceived by Ilango, who would anyway be at the forefront). His dedication and commitment, and his sense of discipline were noticed. He was soon heading RTU’s maintenance department, supervising the work of several technicians to ensure that the sprawling RTU campus, the staff houses, the foster homes, the many schools, the worksheds and other parts of the campus were fully functional.

Sundar was the proverbial black sheep of the family. As the youngest, he also probably took liberty. Having been orphaned at the age of six and with not much of disciplining early in his life, he tended to be wayward. He always had a tendency of not taking life seriously in general – which meant that he did not concentrate on his studies, nor did he pay much attention to relationships. He was, like Ramesh, very adept at picking up skills though. And like Ilango and Ramesh, he was intrinsically a warm, loving and caring person. However, his waywardness put him in the wrong company. His late teens and his early twenties saw him leading a risky life, engaging in street fights, drinking at will and blowing away his earnings on movies, food and other forms of indulgence. He had a small job working in a unit that made steel cupboards. But the work was irregular. I believe there were times when he was out of work and went without proper food for several days. Though he worked in Madurai, I used to meet him often when he would come to visit Ilango and Ramesh in RTU.

In mid-1993, we moved to Delhi. The same year, in winter, he came to visit us in Delhi. It was meant to be a fortnight’s stay. He apparently missed us and wanted to spend some time with us. While he was with us, I learnt that he had been out of work for quite some time. Frustrated in his attempt to find some work, he decided to take a break. He came to Delhi with some cash that he borrowed from a friend, in the hope that on returning to Madurai, he would find a job and pay him back. Hearing that, I asked him to stay back in Delhi, assuring him that we would find a way to pay his friend back. Instead, I asked him to learn driving and learn Hindi. In three months’ time, I was supposed to set up Actionaid’s regional office for Madhya Pradesh in Bhopal. I was hopeful that I could find something useful for him to do there. Sundar was a quick learner. He learnt Hindi. Moving around Delhi on his own boosted his confidence (he had never been beyond any south Indian state earlier). And he learnt driving too. When we moved to Bhopal in April 1994, he came with us. He was, in many ways, my Man Friday. There was a lot of work involved in setting up a new office. He did an excellent job of supporting Prahlad, our Administrative Assistant. In no time, he had explored Bhopal’s roads and could take us anywhere, largely due to Prahlad’s constant guidance. But more importantly, he started taking interest in Actionaid’s work and development work in general. Often, he would sit in various meetings and workshops, trying to understand what development work meant. Often, he asked many pertinent questions. And when he got time, he would also try his hand at the computer (something that I didn’t encourage him at that stage, honestly, fearing that our only PC could break down if not handled well).

A year later, I thought it was time for him to move. He was becoming too dependent on us, which was not healthy for him. That was the time my colleague Tom, who headed Actionaid’s Chennai regional office, was looking for someone like Sundar. We discussed and agreed that Sundar could move to Chennai. In addition to his being trained for the job, it could, in the long run, be beneficial to Sundar too considering that he hailed from Tamil Nadu. And it would also mean that he could start living independently.

Sundar made his mark in Chennai. He was quite popular with the team. He gradually began engaging himself with mainstream development work. That was the time when Actionaid had manage to rope in prominent Tamil filmstars (Suhasini, Revathy, Manorama) to do a film on panchayati raj (political decentralisation) that required lot of outdoor shooting. A film buff to the core, Sundar enjoyed this phase and very enthusiastically worked with the film technicians. All the time, he continued to explore ways to improve himself. He had mastered basic computer operations and became quite adept at surfing the net. He enrolled for a course and learnt the basics of computer hardware, enough for him to start assembling PCs on his own and selling it ! But the highpoint of his career, I think, came when he was asked to get involved in Actionaid’s programmes for the homeless in Chennai and working with commercial sex workers’ of Chennai to enable them explore other livelihood options. It meant late nights and lot of additional work. It meant lot of local travel. It meant rushing people to hospitals or negotiating with the local police. That’s where probably the challenges he faced earlier on in life, came in handy. These were not situations that deterred him. In fact, he relished these opportunities. When I met him at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in January 2004, he was a proud man. He introduced me to a group of sex workers with whom he had been working. He proudly showed the bank pass books these women were maintaining and explained the various processes he was engaged in rehabilitating these sex workers. The women too were very happy about all that Sundar had done and there was a certain bonding. Sundar had arrived, truly arrived !