The Power of Community
My Facebook Community
(Photo by Leah Kelley on Pexels )
It was summer and I was commuting to college. Passing beneath the shady, tree-lined avenue on the approach road to campus, I realized that it was not as cool beneath it as usual. I put my head out and looked up. I realized, to my utter shock, horror and disbelief, that someone had been clandestinely chopping down those 50-year old trees. Four of those old rain-trees, so huge that their leaves met across the broad, two-lane road, had disappeared. I was so perturbed that I don’t know how I conducted my four lectures that day.
I went home seething: and I reached out to my community, my Facebook community.
I have been teaching for three decades and my kids are scattered all around the world. These kids are journalists, police officials, ministers in the government, social activists, bloggers, university professors, actors, models and sports celebrities. It was a general post I put up, but there was instant response. The response converted into concrete action, letters in newspapers, calls for an inquiry. And then I heard, from the highest source, that the trees had to be cut down because of some terminal rot caused by something called the mealy bug. I was devastated: but at least I knew, from the horse’s mouth, as it were, the truth.
In one of our villages, a boy born in utter poverty wanted to educate himself. Kind-hearted school teachers, without any recompense at all, coached him day and night and the child studied, sitting beneath lighted lamp posts on the public road, owing to lack of electricity in his one-room shack.
He scored 96 percent at the Public Board Secondary Exams. Two years later, again with the help of compassionate teachers and administrators, his fees were waived off, and he continued his studies. He scored 98 percent in the engineering entrance exam and he was invited to join the course. He was ecstatic, but NOW he needed money. Tuition fees, hostel fees, money for books.
I appealed again for help on Facebook. Within a week, my kids from all over the world wrote in asking, “Teacher, where do we send the money?” A former student living in Australia wanted to send me 100,000 Rs. He asked whether he could send it to my bank account. I was overwhelmed. They were all on standby, all ready. No questions asked.
But with so much publicity, the Government had got into the act and decided to finance the child’s entire education.
I wrote back, thanking all my good Samaritans, and explained that everything was sorted.
We have a sisterhood of friends and colleagues on Facebook, who lend each other support and encouragement “when things go wrong, As they sometimes will.”
Every time I launch a book, I invite people via Facebook. When I launched my sixth book, “ Have a Blessed Day,” the college was closed for the festival vacation and were it not for Facebook, I wouldn’t have been able to invite anyone. As it is, thanks to Facebook, it was the most well attended launch of all of them.
All my former editors, book cover designers and publishers are also on Facebook. My sons, living in another country, my former travel companions, random strangers who became staunch friends, all of us connect through Facebook. I know it is probably politically incorrect to say so, but I find my community, the community that stays connected through Facebook, very indispensable for my well-being, general joy and good cheer.
This is in response to the very relevant, pertinent prompt of CRY, the Power of Community. Now, more than at any other time in history, we need to build bridges, rather than walls.
