I am interning at a micro finance company called Bandhan. I will make no bones of the fact that this internship is so horribly boring that that the only part I find exciting at the workplace is a narrow crack in my table of the odd week that I have been there I have spent the larger part of my time analysing this crack. It is not that the work done by the company doesn't interest me but that I don't get to do any of this work. My task for the first two days was to analyse their annual report which I finished on the first day itself and came to the irrefutable conclusion that what I had just read was not a report but a promotional brochure that focused more on where the executive director delivered a lecture than on the success of ongoing operations. That's more than enough about Bandhan and my sad life there, now to move onto the main part of this piece/thing. Well, I had been promised a field visit by my boss, she said go there and understand the nature of the work in the field. You see, this excited me I always wanted to work at the grassroots and this was an opportunity for me to get some actual hands on experience and moreover my boss excited me by telling me tales of abject poverty and lanes that cars could not enter.
As with most things in my life I was disappointed with respect to the poverty of the place as it turns out the place where I had to work was about 100 metres from my father's office and all 100 meters of it and within the area the roads, were motorable and trust me in far better condition than the roads outside my college in Bangalore, so much for abject poverty. I made one realisation that day, microfinance although doing a splendid job of helping the poor is not actually reaching that level of poor which actually needs help and whose arms are too frail to even extend to NGOs for aid. I crossed several such people however none of them were beneficiaries of Bandhan's microfinance programs. Ah, I realise I have once again drifted let me once again try to come back to what I was saying.
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Of language and cities within cities
Non-FictionA discussion of how every city is not one but multiple cities, when looked at from the paradigm of economics for example it could be a poor man's and a rich mans city... In addition of how languages open up portals of information and lack of common...
