Deepa Balsavar
Deepa Balsavar
GREY SUNSHINE: STORIES FROM TEACH FOR INDIA Sandeep Rai Aleph Book Company, 2019, 270 pp., 399
November 2019, volume 43, No 11

Grey Sunshine is about the challenges faced by most children in our country to get any sort of education; it is a revelation of the abysmal state of our government schools and educational practices; above all it is about the children, their parents and the educators that make up the programme.

Sandeep Rai, the author, is Chief of City Operations at TFI. He started his career at Teach For America where exposure to some of the most challenging environments in that country led him to realize that his calling and future lay back home, where conditions are infinitely worse. Rai writes of the 10 years since that decision, and the beginnings of the organization in which 4,000 people have now completed their fellowships and worked with over 38,000 children.

The book makes a compelling read. Listening to children in communities where basic facilities are missing and poverty takes on a whole new meaning, it is difficult not to despair. Rai writes early on in the book that spending time in bastis ‘forced me to acknowledge, in ways that I hadn’t before, the deeply damaging effect of hopelessness on the very essence of the human spirit.’ He goes on: ‘We need real stories of success to sustain their aspirations to fuel their desire to hope.’ And that is what Grey Sunshine attempts to do— provide those success stories that sustain the children, their families, the educators and the programme itself. Students from TFI have gone on to complete their schooling; some attend prestigious colleges at home and abroad and as one young girl put it, ‘Don’t I deserve to dream too? I definitely deserve to dream!’

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