Why I volunteer

What can you alone do? Everyone in India is corrupt! All NGOs in India are just there to make money! Even if you do some changes in some small area, India is so big that you will not make any real difference!

Have you heard these before? I have. Not from strangers, but from my friends and family. People very dear to me and who wish me well. People say these things when I tell them about my volunteering for AID (Association for India's Development) and what AID does.

Here's what I say: I am not alone. I work with a very dedicated and smart group of people who want to make a difference in how the other 70% of India lives. These are not people who live in ivory towers and think about doing good for mankind. These are people who know the ground realities of India and decided to take up the challenge nevertheless. I tell them, yes, I know about corruption in India. That is something we have to fight. Ignoring it is not going to make it any better. Any work that I do as part of AID may not solve all of India's problems, but we will make a start. If it takes longer than our lifetimes to make a difference to all of India, so be it. At least we would have begun the work.

The reason why I volunteer for AID is that I feel a deep and abiding sense of gratitude for receiving so much from India. As the other 30% of India, I grew up eating plentiful food provided by farmers who were at or below the poverty line. I drove on roads built by laborers who got paid the minimum wage or less. I got educated in a government run college for a fraction of the real cost. At the end of all this, I still had the freedom to decide where ever in the world I wanted to work to do the best for myself. How could I not be grateful? To me, there is no better way to repay India than making a difference to the lives of the people who are receiving the least from it. AID's philosophy of not shying away from tough problems and looking deep at issues to discover and solve underlying causes makes sense to me.

These words by Rabindranath Tagore exemplify my dream for India:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

I volunteer for AID to help realize this dream.