The Elephant Chaser's Daughter

This year I was brought into the Shanti Bhavan team that selects children for the new pre-school class. My training in psychology and a graduate of the school were considered helpful to the process. Being no stranger to the typical rural life and its cultural disposition, I was confident on providing useful insight into the behavioural and social dynamics that are integral to marginalized communities. By the end of our two months of search, we came to a few realizations. The face of rural communities had undeniably changed over the last decade as job opportunities created by urban industrialization had significantly impacted their life-style. Many commuted daily to cities to work as security guards, housemaids, drivers, construction workers, and in other low level jobs, contributing largely to the labour requirement of businesses. Very often we came upon locked houses and deserted streets, with children away at the local government school and both parents at wor...

It’s very special for a writer who has recently published her debut book to meet her readers first hand. In the early hours of the morning on the 18 th of May, I dodged the heavy traffic in Bangalore to reach Inventure Academy, a world class school on the outskirts of Sarjapura. I had been informed beforehand that all the high-schoolers had watched parts of the Netflix film ‘Daughters of Destiny’ together as a class and had even been assigned to read my book as homework. This level of preparation for my visit undeniably made me nervous because I would be interacting with an audience who knew me quite well from the revealing pages of my book and the raw images of my life in the docu-series. After quickly scanning the large auditorium filled with young students, a few parents and several teachers, I briefly introduced myself and dived into the session by opening up the forum for questions. The first question came from a young boy wearing black rimmed glasses in the front row,...