The gappers

An edited version of the article appeared in the Sunday Eye section of the Indian Express on July 25, 2010.


Chinki Sinha
Udaipur, New Delhi

All through his school years, Nirmal felt he was sprinting, trying his best to be a student so he too could stumble over the finish line.

But in his head, among the jumbled up calculus lessons and geometrical shapes, strange fish were trapped.

And the fish only got bigger. It was as if his head would burst with those. Nirmal wanted to capture them on canvas before his imagination shorted out. But more school work flowed into his hours, and in those crowded hours where he could hear the sound of pens and papers, the air became still, thick and stifling.

That's when he knew he needed a psychological pause, a break year from school, before moving forward so he could slow down, paint his magical fish, and breathe easy.

So Nirmal bunked off after Class 10 when he was 18. In other words, he became a “gapper”, someone who takes a year off during or after school to travel or indulge in hobbies, a popular idea in the west.

“I didn't like what school looked like, or behaved like. It was too much sitting there for hours, your attention compartmentalized into periods,” he says.

Nirmal is among a growing number of children across the country who are walking out of schools to take a break and indulge in what they like to do. They may either join school later or opt for homeschooling after the break. But in their gap year, time taken off between two stages of life by students - between high school and college - they want to travel and explore their own inclinations free from the pressures and restrictions of formal schools. While it is not a recent phenomenon as there are instances of students taking gap year 20 years ago and even before in India when Rabindranath Tagore left his hometown at 11 years to tour the country and be home-educated in history and astronomy, the idea is now gaining ground with many
parents and children who feel a gap year is important for the child to figure out their personality and get a breather.

In the schools that a few parents compare to factories, where children sit for long hours, their personality camouflaged with the school uniform, constricted almost, the children were beginning to feel suppressed, and they were getting homogenized, they said.

So in the absence of school, Nirmal's days expanded. In those drifting middle of the day hours where he could hear the cars honking in the distance, the occasional breeze whispering through the leaves, he painted his fish.

On his canvas, the bodies of the fish disappear midway and from their intertwined torsos explode elephants' heads with shriveled, shrunken noses. On another one, an elephant's trunk metamorphoses into giant, headless snakes. These huge paintings stacked in Nirmal's little studio overlooking the Aravlis in Udaipur, perched on a hill slope in a housing scheme, were tributes to unfettered imagination itself of a
18-year-old.

Had he remained in school, the fish on his canvas would have remained true to its species, he says.

He wasn't painting like this when he was in school. Back then he learned the art of traditional miniature painting – Ganeshas, Maharajas and beautiful queens from the folklore of Rajasthan. Then they suddenly became grotesque, distorted as his imagination expanded in his little room overlooking the city, and in those hours, free from school, his fish outgrew the limits nature had imposed and Nirmal felt
comfortable with the ambiguities of his paintings as he was with his
own nonconformity.

It wasn't easy convincing the family. They thought it was crazy idea. Who drops out of school to paint, they asked.

It was like taking a step backwards and giving up on the chances of a decent job, his mother argued.

But Nirmal knew that if he looked like he knew where he was headed, the questions would eventually fade out. After all he wasn't saying no to school. He would return when he was done finding himself.

At at an art workshop organized by Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development at Udaipur, which was set up by Manish Jain who left the United States after a stint with investment banking and working on international education policy at UNESCO to move towards de-schooling, or how to de institutionalize the individual in 1998, Nirmal figured others like him were taking such sabbaticals, too.

Shikshantar provided a creative space where people – especially young students could experience a different style of learning that more hands-on and community-oriented.

“You know I wanted to take out my feelings on the canvas. We talked a lot. Manish and me. He never told me to leave school. But you know I never liked school not in the way that it held me back from so many things,” he says. “My family was opposed to the idea of the break. But I put my foot down.”

The gap year was all about the things he wanted. In that gap year, he let his imagination run wild on canvas. He hasn't sold a single painting yet. But what he painted in that gap year, he says, set him free.

Nirmal, now 25, never went back to school. The freedom from routine, from teachers that demanded too much, was addictive. The freedom he had stumbled upon, he wasn't prepared to surrender to the system.

***

The 'Gap Year' concept originated after the Second World War when young people started traveling to understand other cultures. It was encouraged by the states to provide for more understanding of global cultures and as a safety valve against future wars. The world was in tatters after two wars. If only youth could travel, cross over, and learned to adapt to diversity and even accept it, peace would not be so elusive.

So the young Brit hippies headed to the mystery countries preaching love and peace, swinging in the sixties to songs that spoke of a world without bombs, without misery, without differences. They too had walked out – many from schools, a few from other institutionalized structures.

The first gapper took off from the UK, traveled on the hippie trail, and set a trend. Then in the 1960s an educational trust was set up to promote Gap Year Volunteer Placements market where students could avail of student work visas and travel abroad, work, and explore.

Toward the fag end of 1970s, GAP Activity Projects, a UK organization, started facilitating volunteer placements for 'Gap Year' in between school and university and that's how it was introduced to the schools first, the concept of gap year.

A new breed of gap travelers started to traverse the world, lured by exotica, looking to find interesting places, and people, taking a break from schools so they didn't “burn out” and could use an extra year to get mature. It became the “rite of passage” for students.

Then in 1998, the gap year hit the world wide web. Launched by Tom Griffiths and Peter Pedrick gapyear.com, the website that helps students and others with information on interim gap year programs and work visas.

Now, the “gap year industry” is slated to become the fastest growing travel sector in the world, according to reports.

In India too, gap year isn't a such recent phenomenon either. Fifteen years ago, Rahul Alvares talked his parents into letting him take a sabbatical after Class 10.

It was during a summer break in Class 9 at the Pune Snake Park when the idea of a gap year first crossed his mind. He promised his parents – Norma and Claude, both conservationists – that if they let him take a year off, he would work hard and score a decent percent in Class 10 examinations. He scored a distinction. He was finally free from school for a year.

On the first day of his year-long break, Rahul Alvares cycled to an aquarium shop in Mapusa in Goa, a two-room shop off the main road with twenty fish tanks. That's where he would work for weeks, breeding fish, learning to build aquariums, and running errands for Ashok D'Cruz, a college friend of his father, who owned the aquarium shop.

He would cycle to the shop at around 9 a.m. and stay there until lunch helping out with everything – cleaning fish tanks, remove dead fish, feed the fish, and run other errands.

Later in his sabbatical year, Rahul went and spent time at the Pune Snake Park after Neelimkumar Khaire, Director of the Snake Park in Pune, called him for a visit.

Khair's daughters Bany and Lara too had taken a sabbatical after completing school a few years ago to travel across the country.

Rahul kept a record of everything. His diary later became a book “Free From School”, a chronology of his experiences in the gap year, that was published by the Other India Press.

In the beginning, Rahul says he almost felt guilty about the gap year. He kept asking himself whether he was allowed this sort of an indulgence. It was the diary that helped him keep track of his days.

“There was nobody else taking a gap year. But after I took my sabbatical, both my brothers took gap years. That year changed my life,” he says.

“It was like I got my freedom. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to handle snakes.”

That's what he eventually did. Rahul Alvares became a herpetologist.

“In school I wanted to have a decent job and breed fish. Then in the gap year the fish thing went out of the window,” he says. “I learned about snakes without knowing if it was the career for me.”

Rahul returned to school, enrolled in science stream, and then went to college for his bachelor's in science. He again took a gap year after his graduation and went off to Thailand to learn more about snakes.

In “Free from School” he begins with “You must try to understand that when I finished school I was as raw as raw could be. I had never travelled anywhere on my own, never purchased a train ticket ... I had no experience of how to handle money ...”

And he concludes with “And I wish to repeat here, at the end of my book, that June 1995 to June 1996 was the most wonderful year that I can ever remember. I learnt a lot, not only about the things I wanted to learn, but about many other things as well. And best of all I had a lot of fun and a whole lot of freedom to do all that I ever wanted to do. I certainly look forward to another sabbatical! And so, by now,
should you!”

The book has been translated in at least two languages and is still in print. Written by a 16-year-old, its 14 chapters are all about Rahul stumbling upon a rare freedom and making the most of it.

In 2008, Samyuktha, who decided to walk out of her school in Andhra Pradesh, wrote yet another book called “Learning the Heart Way” where she wrote about her experience of creating her “own curriculum” after she opted out of the 'rat race of learning’, out of the labyrinths of “endless tests and scores” and the “endless chase after MBA degrees”.

***

While most students abroad spend their gap year traveling around the world volunteering or working overseas, and in part immersing themselves in the culture and most popular destinations for such experiential travel are India, China and Brazil, in India students mostly travel around the country, helping out with community service in rural areas. A few who can afford it even travel to different countries like Sakhi, a Nashik-based girl, who took a gap year after Class 7 at 13 years. Sakhi traveled to Jordan and Lebanon in her first gap year that she took five years ago. She later decided to opt for homeschooling and returned to formal education in high school three years later because she felt the need to go back to her peer group.

“School was just not giving me time to do things I wanted to do,” she said. “After a point I started not looking forward to going to school. That was when I wanted to get out for a year and explore.”

So in Class 7, when she was 12 years old, Sakhi put together presentation called “Skipping School” where she listed all the things – learning Sanskrit and French, traveling, cooking, art – she would want to do in her gap year from school for her parents.

Her parents – Anita and Nitin – were supportive of their daughter's decision.

“We thought Sakhi should give it a try. Our own belief in the education system was dwindling. It is not as if nobody is thinking about alternative ways of learning and a few silent people full of conviction are charting their own path. People just fail to understand that there are other ways of learning,” Anita says.

Sakhi left college this year after finishing her intermediate to take another gap year.

Earlier this year she was in Delhi teaching English to women from lower income groups who are training to become cab drivers at the Azad Foundation. She also traveled to Canada with her parents to participate in a seminar on young leaders and alternative education.

Her friend, Mukta Navrekar, 20, another Nashik girl who took a break from mainstream education after her Class 12, spent her sabbatical year volunteering for the Indian Red Cross Society and then for the Nirmal Gram Nirman Kendra, an organization run by her parents that works on environmental sanitation in rural areas.

“I was not interested in mainstream education. I didn't know what I would do after school or college. I wanted to find myself and this way I gained experience that helped me figure what I want to do in life,” she says.

Now, Mukta is pursuing her bachelor's in sociology from IGNOU and doing community service.

While many of those who are taking a break year belong to higher middle class segment, the idea is trickling down to other strata of the society too, says Nyla Coelho of TaleemNet, an organization or a facility that helps people to think outside of set norms of learning and is part of the Multi World Network, an international body of thinkers who want to restore the diversity of learning and challenge the prescribed education system.

Last year, a student Minshu Kulkarni from Dharvar in Karnataka visited her facility in Goa with a friend after they decided to take a break from school.

“He took the gap year after Class 10 and came with his friend. Both of them are now traveling in various parts of the country like the Himalayas and this year they will decide what they want to do,” she says. “They thought going from one classroom to another didn't offer much. Since 2000 many children have come to us. It is a tough thing to do but there are a lot of serious parents and children who are choosing to do this..”


***

In the United States, guidance counselors and admissions officers are increasingly advising the high school seniors to explore the option of gap year so they could get a refresher and a primer on life outside classroom and its limited world. In 2009, Princeton University in New Jersey in United States formalized the gap year program wherein, students who have been accepted into the university, will be asked to
go for a year of social work to other countries and those that do accept will be eligible for financial aid. Many companies also offer gap year programs.

In India, gap year is not so institutionalized yet. India's first Gap Year College was founded in 2007 in Kempty in Mussourie, Uttaranchal. The nine-month programme meant for people more than 18 years old offers creative design, architecture, wood art, sketching, theatre, publishing, environment and ecology, among other things. Three years later, Manish Jain set up Swaraj University in Udaipur that offers a two-year learning program for people who are 16 years and older and who are interested in green-collar enterprises and are willing to support local communities.

But barring these two, there's not much recognition to the concept of a gap year.- in the country.

Gap year still raises doubts. It still veers away from the standard. Gappers are still a rare bunch of either “too cool” kids or “loser” ones who didn't quite make it in school. It is considered a luxury that only the well-heeled can afford.

Others, if they fall out of the herd, they will no doubt hit the pits.

Amita Mulla Wattal, principal of Springdales School Pusa Road in New Delhi, says her students belonged to middle and lower middle classes and they couldn't afford such a break.

“The question is who will fund this gap year. This is a luxury of choice,” she says.

That's what the family of Sunny, who also took a gap year after Class 12, argued. They weren't “rich” and Sunny like his brothers needed to get a proper job with a regular income.

But to Sunny, a lean, lanky guy who looks out of place in the neighborhood with his curly hair that frame his face and cool T-shirts, the idea of a sabbatical, a whole year free from textbooks, from anxiety, from routine was alluring, liberating almost.

Three years into his gap year, Sunny, who bakes solar cookies, says formal school only him, he says.

Three years ago when he had first walked out of his school in Udaipur, he traveled to Auroville in Puducherry, Kerela, Maharashtra, Goa , and then worked at a village alternative school called Hunar in a tiny hamlet in Rajasthan teaching children life skills, rain water harvesting, sharing other pieces of knowledge that he had picked up on his travels.

When he got back from his travels, he bought a second-hand solar cooker, and now uses local grains to bake cookies that he also sells on orders. Eventually, he wants to increase awareness about local grains and about solar energy.

“In my break year, I learned about alternative education. I asked a lot of questions, I found many answers and now I know what I really want to do,” he says. “I took a different path and I am happy I chose to be unconventional.”

Sunny too never went back to school. But his family asked him to take open examinations. There was too much at stake. He can't be baking solar cookies all his life, his mother Mangi Devi said.

In the little living room of his house in a housing cluster, his brothers, who have gone on and completed their graduation, are a little unsure about Sunny's choice.

“We felt why was he doing it? We didn't approve,” Mangi Devi, his mother said.

But Sunny counts the names of people, of people who did well in life despite dropping out of school. In his own way, even though the rebel tried to be the non-conformist, he succumbed to the temptation of the system's definition of “successful.”

Even Rama's parents opposed the idea of her taking a gap year. That would hold her back while her peers would go on to complete college in time. But for Rama, school wasn't helping her indulge in passions that consumed her imagination. She didn't want to be a doctor or a teacher, to live out her parent's aspirations.

“I believed I could convince them. I have learned a lot and matured as an individual. I am more confident. I feel as if I could do anything,” she says.

Rama walked out of her government school after Class 10 around three years ago. Armed with a handy cam that she was given as part of a film making workshop in Goa, she is now trying to capture life and its quirks. The first film that she shot was called “Meri Movie” and it told her story, how she left school, and how she has changed as a person.

After she walked out of school, she suddenly stumbled upon lots of open space, space that she needed to fill. There was no routine anymore, no compulsions, only desire, and imagination.

She is now pursuing her studies through open schooling, torn between her own rebellion and her parents' concern for her but she is still making films, her latest being on the only woman auto driver in Udaipur Manju Khatri or “auto aunty” in Udaipur.

There are several other examples like Ravi from Delhi who left school after Class 9 who dabbled in street theatre and has now launched his own organization, NECTAR, to share performance media with street children. Or like Chinmay Futane who quit his distance education programme from IGNOU after his year off from school to do organic farming.

The walkouts also represent a diversity of background like the Delhi-based girl
Aayushi, a student of Class 5 at Apeejay School Noida, who is in the third month of her year-long break.

Her father Sanjiv Pandey said he was not unhappy with the school but with the “rote” education system with its focus on examinations.

“Holistic development is important. Right now, we are exploring, traveling. We will see how it works out and then she can either go back to school or we will decide to homeschool her,” he says.

Whether students find purpose in their gap year, or whether the sabbatical is a trait of those who are bothered with the uncertainty in their lives, it is nonetheless a breather.

As Nyla Coelho puts it “Along the way, let's savor each moment, for life is in the here and now. Having 'walked out', let's walk on…"

Love story of a former street kid

Last Thursday night I was researching a story on walking tours of Delhi when I stumbled upon an article published in The Guardian four years ago about this Salaam Baalak Trust City Walk ... There were two numbers listed - Shekhar and Javed - if you wanted to book the walking tour through city's street life. It was 10:30 p.m. I just called the number. Asked for Javed. The guy on the other side said Javed had left and now lives in America and was married. I was curious. So I asked to tell me more. Shahadutt now conducts the walking tours and was Javed's friend.
He said an American girl fell in love with him and she came back several times for him and the two got married this year ... I told my editor. He said I must write the love story. So I ransacked the facebook and found Javed, sent him a friend request and a message. He accepted. It was 2 a.m. We spent large part of the night chatting and then called him the next day and I asked if he could send me those firt emails and he said why not. I guess it was simple. This one had me converted.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on Sunday, June 11. And my editor didn't cut this one at all.


Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 9, 2010

She was the girl who passed by the Salaam Baalak Trust with the little dog. That’s how Cristina Maria Kameika identified herself in the email she wrote a year later to Javed, the tour guide, the man who
grew up on the city’s streets getting high on Tipp-ex and subsequently redeemed himself, crossed over to the other side of the street and was conducting guided tours of the lives of the street children in Delhi.
“I had even thought for a second ‘wow! I think this is the one!’. I felt a strong attraction and connection,” she wrote on October 1, 2007, a year after the two – an American girl who was in India traveling and volunteering, and Javed, a runaway child from Bihar who battled the city’s brutal streets, slept with dogs and other infernal beings, ate leftover food, and later lived in a shelter home run by Mira Nair’s trust founded in 1988 now run by her mother Praveen Nair and three others, and continued his studies.
Javed wrote back ‘I am but anything. You are everything.’
It took Cristina nine more trips to India to figure out her attraction. It was love. Three years later, the two got married earlier this year in Atlanta, Georgia, where she lives with her father, a captain with Delta Air Lines.
Over the phone from Atlanta, 26-year-old Javed’s voice is peppered with a slight accent and he refers to his village as “countryside.” He is adapting to his new life in an apartment next to his father-in-law's place. Now he drives a Honda CRV and is trying to apply to a master's program in a university there. Tom, Cristina's father, is also helping him find a job as a translator with the airlines.
“I have to start somewhere,” he says.
Four years ago, he had seen Cristina walk towards him at the Aasra, a night shelter for homeless kids near Hanuman Mandir. He says he loved her laughter and her short hair. She had a dog – Rocky - and she came looking to volunteer at the center.
A day ago, Cristina, then 23 years old, had gone on a guided tour – Salaam Baalak Trust – City Walk – an walking tour of city's Paharganj and New Delhi Railway Station areas aimed at sensitizing others about street life and street children.
She had seen posters advertising the walk and she came. Later, she landed at the centre wanting to volunteer. Her girlfriend who she was living with at the time was not interested in the things she wanted to do so she came along, Rocky tagging along.
“I liked his smile,” Cristina says. “I had a feeling after 5 minutes of talking to him that he was the one. It was weird. The feeling was in the stomach. And I thought it was a crazy feeling and i thought what the hell I am American and how can I do this.”
But Cristina kept coming back to the night shelter with her dog under the pretext that she brought Rocky so the kids could play with the dog. She would sit and listen to Javed narrate to her strange stories about his life on the streets, how he spent cold nights curled up in a secret attic with dangling electric wires, how the cold bit into his skin and how he once crashed a big, fat Indian wedding and danced and ate chicken wings until the guards chased him out.
Javed, who was studying sociology through distance education from Delhi University, was working as a tour guide for the Salaam Baalak City Walk, an initiative of John Thompson, a volunteer from the UK who spent a lot of time working with the street children in the city. He lived in a one-room tenement at Paharganj and earned only Rs. 4,000.
AK Tiwari, an educative member at the Salaam Baalak Trust, said Javed had emailed all of them about his marriage and how happy he was.
“He was a happy child. But he didn't want to go home. He belonged to a poor family and then we admitted him to a government school. We are all very happy for him,” he says.
Cristina, Javed says, came from a different world. He didn't want to lose his only job by proposing her. Besides, those kind of love stories only played at the Sheila Theater where he watched mushy romance movies with his street buddies. Javed had run away from home at eight years and lived on the streets of Delhi for more than two years before he was rescued by the trust's members.
Cristina was looking for signs. She painted lotuses outside a shop in Paharganj. She called Javed to come see those. He didn't turn up.
But Javed had called the number and the landlord said Cristina didn't live there. She went back to America, broken-hearted.
Meanwhile, Javed hung all the paintings that Cristina brought over his bed at the shelter, and at the trust's office. A few of them still hang there.
But she missed him. So she wrote to him and he responded and she was on a flight back to India, to the dusty, grimy streets.
“My mom said yeah, you should go for your dreams and see if this is real. It was so perfect. I went back nine times,” Cristina says. "It was so much fun."
Cristina's own parents divorced when she was little. Her mother, who stays in Miami, Florida, attended her wedding. She says the family had no issues with her converting to Islam, or with her taking on a Muslim middle name.
"Their marriage broke. Mine won't. I have never been so happy before. I have never met a guy like him. This is a crazy love story," she says, her voice laden with excitement.
She even visited Kalyanpur, a village in Munger district of Bihar where Javed's parents lived. During the week she spent there, locals would climb up their roofs to see her. She was the first white person to visit their “countryside”, Javed recalls.
“She wore salwar kameez and did everything that was in our culture. My mother who was a bit hesitant about me marrying someone outside our religion loved her,” Javed says.
Even Cristina's father flew in from the United States to spend time with Javed.
The couple got engaged in Delhi and then flew to the United States. Cristina changed her name to Cristina Khatoon Kameika and even wore a saree in the small ceremony at their Atlanta house after they registered their marriage at the court.
While Cristina is pursuing her studies from Georgia State University, Javed is hoping he will get a head start in life, too.
Among everything else that he took to the states, he carried the box where he had kept the printouts of all the emails Cristina had ever written to him and her lotus paintings.
Back home, his friends Vicky and Shahdutt hope the fairytale romance comes their way, too.
"It is one hell of a journey from the streets to America, and then marry the girl of your dreams," a friend says.