udai

NGO Post is the latest Udai venture. Since Phantom and Parul have put together excellent documentation, I'll just steal it from the website:

So if you come across any inspiring/interesting stories involving NGOs in India or elsewhere, please do share. And spread the word!!

We, at Udai are trying to do some research on student organizations in US universities. In particular, our focus is on student organizations working for helping their home countries. The goal of the study is to analyze various models of student organizations – what kinds of models are popular, what kind of projects these organizations undertake, what works and what doesn't, why do some organizations/projects “die out” after sometime while others continue to sustain themselves and so on.

While there is a plethora of literature regarding functioning of NGO's, not much has been studied about various student led initiatives outside the country. Being such an initiative itself, Udai is trying to put together a report, in which we hope to answer fundamental questions like:

• What are the different models of such organizations?
• What are the important factors for them to be effective?
• What has been the impact of their work?
• How this information can help new organizations better position themselves to create a positive impact?

So if you are are/were involved in any such student organization, I'd love to hear from you. Please email me at diwaker.at.floatingsun.net or leave a comment below.

So today I finally managed to print and read through the entire LKY speech (More on LKY on Wikipedia) as well as Atanu's analysis in four parts. Primarily because I was going to present the material in today's SJC at Udai.

The speech was good, so was the analysis. But there was nothing new in there. Well known problems, well known solutions (or ideas for solutions). The usual rants, the usual suggestions, the usual (common-sensical) insights. In that sense, I didn't get much out of reading the whole thing (and combined with the analysis, it makes for fairly voluminous reading).

But I did catch some minor points here and there that I found interesting. Like I didn't know that Nehru had been offered to make India a member of the UN Security Council way back, and he declined. Or that the IT sector makes up for only around 2-3% of India's GDP. And lots more like that. Its fairly good reading though, for a saturday morning

And we did have some good discussion afterwards, so it was worth it. I haven't been able to do much of book reading though lately, and haven't even been able to catch up with all the magazines yet

We at Udai organized a Panel on Global Combat against AIDS/HIV a few days back. It turned out pretty well, and I learned a lot. We had four speakers – each speaker was given 15 minutes to talk about some of the work that they were doing and generally talk about things they wanted to convey to the audience. This was followed by a panel discussion with audience questions.

Some of the things I liked:

• The turnout was actually quite good. Though it would have been nice to have some more Indians around, considering that Udai is an Indian student organization
• The speakers were all so experienced and had considerable depth in their fields. They had a lot of interesting anecdotes and numbers to share with us
• I was really inspired by the passion of the panelists – they were all so motivated, had such strong feelings towards their respective causes that one could not help but feel a little motivated too
• The dinner afterwards was also quite nice (barring the fact that almost all the speakers got parking tickets)

If you're interested, you can check out the slides of the talks

Recently I've been involved with a campus organization called Udai – we are just a group of students trying to help out India in small little ways. You can find more about us on the web site. While I do want to get involved in more substantial ways, currently my only contribution is maintaining and hosting Udai's website.

Saurabh recently visited Jagruthi, a small NGO in Bangalore, for whom we recently did a fund raiser back in San Diego. He has written a small article on his experience, which can be found here.

The website is still under contstruction and will probably always remain so But so long as it serves the purpose and can attract some more people interested in this kind of work, I'm ok with it.