Lighting the Spark

This incident happened in the UK centre a few weeks back. And I am certain that I will quote this whenever I get a chance. The computer session was in progress. The topic being covered was MS PowerPoint. Kids were in small groups trying to make a simple 2-slide presentation on any topic of thier choice. For visuals, we had asked them to select a suitable clipart picture and insert it in the slide.

One boy stood out from the rest of the class in this activity. Manivannan, the little boy with an ever bright face, was at first puzzled that his laptop did not have any clipart pictures. After a few minutes of futile searching, there was suddenly a gleam on his face. He had cracked it ! He used the webcam in the laptop, posed smilingly in front of it, clicked himself and saved his photograph on the destop. He then inserted this into his powerpoint slide and titled the presentation ‘About Me” – Manivannan, and went on to add a few bullet points about himself.

That was a moment of happy re-assurance that Deepam’s efforts in ‘lighting the spark’ were indeed paying off. Balaji, who was Manivannan’s mentor on that day couldn’t stop smiling for a long time after this happened.

His day was made !

– Anuradha

Drawing @ Deepam

What a surprise it was to see the Urur Kuppam kids armed with colour pencils for the saturday class – 10th Oct. We had mentioned to them the previous week about a competition announced by Young World, and what participation ! Kishore ran home to fetch A4 sheets for all. And new volunteer Giri chipped in with crayons , that he dashed home to get ! What spirit ! From then on it was several artists at work, each poring over his or her paper, so diligently, and with so much attention to detail. Will attempt to publish the scanned drawings – each more endearing than the other, so you can see the effort and enthusiasm that went into that one hour ! Balaji, Nisha, Giri and I had a great time going around encouraging them, and praising all the effort. (Srini, had to rush to organise the next event)

Interacting with kids is always rewarding. The take-away for us volunteers this time was “diligence” – in even a simple activity like Drawing.


– Anuradha