A Free School Under the Bridge - A Photo Story

Like every other metro city across the globe, New Delhi is also changing fast – socio-economically, culturally, as well as architecturally. It has still remained a horizontal city (unlike Mumbai or New York, which had to grow vertically) but is slowly becoming a maze of flyovers and bridges. Most of these belong to the municipal authorities, while the rest belong to the Delhi Metro Railways. While the authorities are trying to convert the space below these flyovers to landscaped (unnatural to me) gardens, some are still abandoned, belonging to the drug addicts or homeless at night. One of those non-descript flyovers in East Delhi is, however, different. The barren space below, with a few trucks parked in one half, comes alive with innocent voices every working day from 9 am to 4 pm. A free school has been running there for the last 15 years for underprivileged children from the slums nearby along the river Yamuna. The school was started with just a few children by one good Samaritan in 2006. The founder couldn’t complete his own college education due to a lack of money and kept his kitchen running by running a grocery shop. But he was determined that children in the neighborhood shouldn’t suffer the same fate, and the free school came into being – without any building, classrooms, benches, or any other infrastructure. It never received any registration but slowly grew as more children joined and a few more good Samaritans started teaching. The school now has around 70 students (boys in the morning, girls in the afternoon) learning language to Mathematics to History. This story is not unique, but it is different. It is different solely due to rare humanity peeping out of every layer of the story – the founder and the few teachers, who joined later, never received any money for their devotion, and the school was never evicted by the authorities for occupying public space, nobody asked a few art college students to paint the walls or donate blackboards, nobody asked some good men and women to donate some money or school uniform once in a while and nobody asked people like me to tell this story. The last day I went there, I saw a small idol of Lord Ganesha (the Hindu elephant god – the god of wealth) lying in the dust in one corner with the students studying at a distance. These young boys were studying just to get the blessings of Lord Ganesha to have a better life – I thought. As I walked out of that space, I saw a flower starting to bloom on a plant that these children must have watered for months. Change is inevitable, but this one is so good !! [An appeal: the school and its students never asked for any donation. But I am personally sure they will benefit if they get any. If anyone wants to donate, I will be happy to connect the donor directly with the school].