CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL ISSUES

REPORT ON THE FIELD VISIT TO HRIDAY KUNJ AND SAFAI

VIDYALAYA

SUBMITTED TO,

Mr. SAURABH ANAND

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY,

GUJARAT NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY

SUBMITTED BY,

MRINMAY KUSHAL,

BATCH 2017-2022

REGISTRATION NUMBER: 17A088

 The bsw family OF
1st years
2nd years
Along with JAYESH BHAI PATEL AND DIKEN
and our very own faculty members
 INTRODUCTION TO HRIDAY KUNJ

Take a Tour

This was Gandhiji’s home in the Ashram. Kakasaheb Kalelkar named it

Hriday Kunj. Gandhiji and Kasturba lived here from 1918 to 1930. Here
he met national and international personalities. He left the Ashram in
1930 with a vow- “not to return to this Ashram till India became
independent”. Inside there are 6 rooms: Gandhiji’s; Kasturba’s; Guest
Room, Kitchen, Store room and Secretariat. There are also replicas and
some originals, including Gandhiji’s Charkha and Writing Desks.

Hriday Kunj is a site of historical importance and can located in the city
of Ahmedabad in Gujarat. It is reputed for having earlier served as a
place of residence for the great leader of the Indian Movement towards
Independence. The man was none other than Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi or Mahatma Gandhi, as he is more popularly known.  Historical
records indicate that MK Gandhi started his experiments of non-violent
demonstrations of Sathyagraha in India’s fight towards freedom from
Hriday Kunj. It was from this place where the Mahatma began his famous
salt march back in 1930. Gandhiji was a resident of Hriday Kunj during
the years 1918-1930.
This small house from where MK Gandhi initiated his freedom struggle is
considered a national monument and is carefully preserved at the Gandhi
Ashram. This place also served as haven for untouchables who were
unfairly discriminated those days on the basis of caste. Todaythe ashram
at Hriday Kunj, which is located on the banks of the Sabarmati River,
produces a variety of handicrafts, spinning wheels and handmade paper.

INTRODUCTION TO SAFAI VIDYALAYA AND

JAYESHBHAI PATEL

Safai Vidyalaya is the original branch of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, an

initiative established by Gandhi in 1932 to bring greater sanitation
through instilling a sensitivity and removal of untouchability, as well as
fostering the engineering and designing of toilets and sanitation
technologies to suit diverse populations and needs across the state and
nation.
Today, Safai Vidyalaya resides in a corner of the Gandhi Sabarmati
Ashram. It offers health and nutrition-specific two-day trainings for
Anganwadi teachers, one-day trainings for Sanitation Inspectors, and
various workshops for individuals from the villages. Through these
trainings, Safai Vidyalaya serves 5,000 teachers each year.

In addition, this space offers opportunities for “inner sanitation”. Outside

the offices resides a “Toilet Café,” where various members of the Gandhi
Ashram ecosystem host events and hold space for gatherings that allow
for inner reflection, receptive listening, and genuine sharing of stories. In
addition, a much-loved “Toilet Garden” sits in front of the building,
offering visitors and guests a visual display of the various ways in which
toilets can be designed to suit different needs.
Not often do we meet people that seem to have that special ability to see
right into the center of our hearts, causing it to expand with the love that
we didn’t even know we held.  Jayesh Patel is one of those authentic
beings.  On any given day, you might find him sitting on a set of muddy
stairs in the middle of the slums, lovingly cutting the dirty nails of young
children or you might hear him delivering the keynote at a grand opening
for a new organization. But for him it’s all one and the same; by living in
a very powerful state of being, whatever he finds himself doing is only an
expression of service channeled through the alignment of his head, heart,
and hands.  A guest on our Global Awakin conversation, he shared
wisdom from the heart.

“ Jayeshbhai (“bhai” is an endearing term for “brother”) was deeply

influenced and inspired by his father, Ishwar Patel.  He was known as
“Mr. Sanitation” in India, had built 200,000 toilets, started 118
organizations including the Environmental Sanitation Institute, but he
never talked about any of it. 

He would tell his son, “Don’t carry these heavy loads to change the
world.  Do the work that is connected to your heart and you’ll become
like an instrument of nature.” 

Many would agree that Manav Sadhna is not your typical NGO. More like
an incubator of compassion and love through one’s inner transformation,
hundreds of international volunteers have come there with a results
oriented framework for changing the world and left with a greater
commitment to changing themselves.  It started with Jayeshbhai, his
wife, Anar Patel, and their noble friend, Viren Joshi.  They would go out
to the street or a slum area and meet with kids.  Whether they were
playing with them, cleaning them, cutting their nails, or feeding them
nutritional snacks, their intention was just to give value by making the
kids smile.  Today Manav Sadhna serves more than 8000 children and
women through more than 35 projects that have organically emerged
based on the needs and participation of the community.

The Two Magic Ingredients

If you asked Jayeshbhai how it all came to be, his reply would be simple,
bringing to light two integrated components: the beauty of small and the
power of relationships.

“Small is beautiful.  So many times we get caught up with visible impact

and we want to see results and through this, we create desire, stress,
and misery.  But if we focus on the power of small, what we can do in
this very moment, impact will naturally emerge if that’s what is needed
in the world.”
The second component involves building relationships instead of projects.

Jayeshbhai elaborates that in order to develop meaningful relationships,

we must focus on understanding people instead of trying to change
them.  As soon as we do that, we will deepen our understanding of who
we are and what our relationship with them means. Slowly, we will see
that we are all interconnected, our journeys are intertwined.

A powerful story that Jayeshbhai shared by Neil Patel truly illustrates

what might emerge by focusing on small acts and relationships from a
place of compassion.  “Like any other household, at Jayeshbhai's and
Anarben's home, when guests would come over they would serve them
tea. But at some point they asked why should that be limited to just their
friends and acquaintances? So one day Jayeshbhai goes out into a busy
public area, asking passers-by, "Would you like to come to our home and
have tea?" And like that Jayeshbhai began having tea with strangers in
his home. One of those strangers was a vegetable seller, who was
carrying a huge heavy parcel of vegetables on her head. As they had tea,
Jayeshbhai learned that she was very poor and had to walk miles with
that parcel every morning to sell her vegetables to be able to earn for her
children. Because she was on foot, she would have to leave her home at
4am to get to the market on time.  Jayeshbhai asked if she would benefit
from having a wooden cart to transport her vegetables, and she said of
course. So Jayeshbhai gets one for her. A few months later she comes
back to tell him how much the cart has made a difference for her, how
much time and effort she saves and how grateful she is. And to top it all
off she hands Jayeshbhai Rs.800 to pay him back for the cart! Jayeshbhai
is moved by this, but instead of keeping it he asks the woman to bring
back someone else she knows who would benefit from having a cart, so
they could pay forward. The woman brings back a friend, who then
brings a friend of hers, and so on until eventually they had funded 59
carts! And all of it started from a simple but radical cup of tea. It's a
reminder that even a seemingly small act of kindness can lead to
powerful ripple effects that we cannot predict.”

Purity of Intention

At the center of small acts and building relationships lies the purity of
your intention.  Jayeshbhai believes that with purity in our hearts comes
clarity in our minds.  Recently, he was traveling to a village in India and
along the way he came across two children.  Both were cute but were
very dirty with running noses.  Jayeshbhai had a sudden impulse to clean
one of their noses but knew they were getting late.  So instead, he
reached into his pocket and shared a chocolate.  Upon reaching the
village, they held a prayer and after opening his eyes, that same child
was right there standing near him.  “I don't know how that happened.  I
feel that it was the power of intention. I genuinely believe nature
supports good intentions.”  Jayeshbhai carefully cleaned her nose and
combed her hair.  It was such a small act, yet it was imbued with so much
love and compassion.  Afterwards, the spirit of that child became a huge
asset to everyone in his group. Wherever they went, it felt like family and
they felt connected to each other. “When we are guided by pure
intention, there is no room for capital “I”.  Not only are we able to see
clearly but nature also supports us.”
 
This purity of intention is also what Jayeshbhai believes transforms
consumption into contribution, ensuring there is enough for everyone. 
As Mahatma Ghandi so aptly expressed, “There is enough for everyone’s
need but not enough for everyone’s greed.”  How does someone like
Jayeshbhai internally process so much poverty and destruction?  He
approaches this by truly believing that when work is done with devotion,
faith, and bhaav (goodness and loving coming from within), then that
inner sentiment will reach everywhere and the person will experience a
shift within from greed to need and from consumption to contribution.

As an example, Jayeshbhai shared another story from an afternoon at the

Gandhi Ashram. There he was sitting on the stoop when a woman from
the slum community walked up to him with her little girl.  Moved by her
innocence, he was inspired to buy her an ice cream cone, which she
quickly ate, leaving traces of the delicious cream around her face.  It was
a picture perfect moment and Jayeshbhai captured it with a camera.  A
few weeks later, the mother of that child returned to Jayeshbhai
completely distraught.  She explained between tears that her little girl
had disappeared and the mother was desperate to find her but didn’t
have a single picture of her that she could show as identification.  The
mother requested the ice cream cone picture that Jayeshbhai had joyfully
taken.  She spent the next few years showing the picture of her child to
everyone she met, to the police station officers, to school teachers, to
temple leaders, to everyone.  The mother never gave up.  Then one day,
the girl was found.  Without that kind of faith and bhaav, imagine what
might have happened to the girl. 
Who Jayeshbhai is today is the result of years of inner cultivation.  When
he first started out, he didn’t understand his father’s devotion to
sanitation but he knew he wanted to serve.  His first assignment was to
clean 125 public toilets.  Jayeshbhai would start out in the mornings with
his father in his brand name clothes and Nike shoes and begin the dirty
work side by side.  Bit by bit, he began understanding that the work his
father was doing wasn't just about toilets. As he started to interact with
the community and with the women, and reflect every evening with his
father, Jayeshbahi learned how the work of sanitation was connected
with everything else; it integrated health and hygiene, education,
women's empowerment, and untouchability.  Ishwar Kaka was not trying
to solve all of these problems but he was connecting with the seed that
would naturally blossom into solutions, the seed of compassion.

Jayeshbhai continues to focus on the small, build relationships, and

approach everyone and everything with love.  It is very hard to believe
that someone who flows so naturally through life wears so many hats.  In
addition to all of the Manav Sadhna projects that he is involved with,
Jayeshbhai is also the President of Harijan Sevak Sangh (dedicated to the
untouchable community), Director of Environment Sanitation Institute,
helped start Seva Café (a gift economy restaurant in Ahmedabad,
Gujarat), and is on the board of many organizations such as India First,
Gandhi Ashram, and the School for the Blind. But he views all these
organizations and roles as spaces to find himself through service.
If you ever have the wonderful opportunity to meet Jayeshbhai in your
life, don’t ever try to praise him. As he will throw away all the praise, and
keep only your love.

ABOUT THE VISIT

On the 27th of September, 2017 at about 3.00 pm our BSW team

comprising of 1st years, 2nd years and faculty members went for this visit
of Hriday Kunj and Safai Vidyalaya. It was a great learning curve for all
of us as we learnt a lot of new things about our ‘Father of the Nation’ and
also, JayeshBhai Patel motivated to another level and showed us a
complete new picture of life. Hriday Kunj is gave us a deep insight into
why Mohandas became Mahatma and this was possible due to Diken Sir,
who was present there to guide us and tell us certain stories about the
Mahatma that we had never heard of. We took a look on all the
compartments of Hriday Kunj and all the replicas and original memoirs
from the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Bai Gandhi kept there.
After, Diken Sir gave us all the details about Hriday Kunj that was
possible in the short time, he took us to Safai Vidyalaya, a place where
we would meet JayeshBhai Patel and who would eventually change our
thought process forever. We were welcomed into the land of toilets
where everything was toilet themed. There was the toilet garden and also
the toilet café. But what we loved the most was the session he had with
us inside speaking to us. As we entered, we were made to wear miniature
dolls on our arms which we later came to know, symbolized as a
remembrance for us to realize the problems faced by women in India, our
mothers, our sisters, our daughters due to lack of proper toilet facilities.
JayeshBhai spoke about how this journey of making toilets for the people
of India started by his father became such an integral part of our life,
how in an Indian household, toilets are disregarded but infact toilets are
one of the most important places and must be at par with temples
because temples cleanse our soul and toilets cleanse our body. Whatever,
he spoke on that day was a new inspiration in every sentence. He also did
a very interesting activity where everyone was given a card and a task
was specified on that card and each one of us had to do that activity as
soon as possible. My task to “translate a news article and make my
colleagues hear it” and I did my activity that day itself at night after
dinner. Then Jayeshbhai took us on a tour of toilet garden, toilet café and
human waste fertilisation plant. Then, we had a group picture and then
we taken to the Sabarmati Ashram gift shop run by an NGO where no
one bought anything as the prices were too high but it was a good
initiative. After that, we all returned together in our GNLU bus. Coming
back, we all felt that this small visit shall always remain to play an
integral part in some point in our lives hence I am thankful to the college
authorities for taking us for this visit.