Dog Blogs Travel Trips

On Monday morning I found myself bundled into yet another State Transport bus. Yes. My department hires ST buses! We were visiting  SPARROW. They are a trust set up in 1988 to build a national archive for women with print, oral history and pictorial material. They include live archives reaching out to schools, colleges, women's groups and other organizations, believe they are active agents of change, maintain a forum for discussions, have created an interactive space and have made a daring flight into unexplored areas of experience and expression. We met their staff, and browsed through their publications. We went to their archives room, gingerly leafing through yellowed newspaper articles painstakingly inserted in plastic sheets for preservation. The amount of hard work and dedication required was evident. SPARROW has archived journal articles, newspaper and other print articles, movie posters, calendars etc all by or for women. Also, they have made up to 25 films on wom

I travelled to Mhaswad, Satara today, and what an experience it was!! We took a bus, and it was a run down ramshackle excuse of a vehicle as compared to the ones our department has hired before. Anyway. Wannabe social activists should know how the common man lives so I settled down to what I expected to be a long, boring ride.  Like Naomi always says, when in India, expected the unexpected. After popping a pill for travel sickness, I promptly passed out. Sitting up. And began my collection of ‘tengus’. I whacked my head around quite a bit as I kept falling asleep. We were bumped and jolted around for four hours before we finally reached. The driver had already begun showing of his Schumacher-esque skills and I should have been prepared for what was to happen later, but I’ll come to that later. We visited Manndeshi Mahila Business School and Bank for women. A revolutionary bank set up to empower and enable rural women in banking, this one was an eyeopener for me. The bank provides