When I first began my journey as a Swar Fellow, I carried a mix of excitement and uncertainty. I came with my training, my notebook, my frameworks, and the belief that I was ready to understand the community. But community work, I realised, does not begin with knowledge. It begins with surrender with letting go […]
Category: Fellowship
Fellowship programs in social development usually are designed as youth social leadership immersions wherein young people undertake challenging development projects and learn about society, development and self as part of a leadership journey
When I look back at the last few months of my Swar Fellowship, I realise that the most powerful part of this journey hasn’t been the activities or the reports, it has been the quiet, slow, human process of building trust. As fellows, we enter communities with a project plan, a purpose, and a list […]
During my fieldwork as a Swar Fellow, there were many moments when the theories I had read suddenly came alive in front of me. But nothing struck me as strongly as the idea Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” I had studied this earlier, […]
Before joining the Swar Fellowship, I had read bell hooks’ Feminism Is for Everybody and admired its simplicity and clarity. But only after spending months in the field did her ideas start feeling real. Hooks talks about feminism not as a theory, not as something meant for a classroom or an elite group, but as […]
One of the most powerful parts of my Swar Fellowship has been learning how differently women experience life, opportunity, and oppression. In the beginning, I used to think “women’s issues” were similar everywhere mobility, safety, income, workload. But as my fieldwork deepened, I realised something more complex: every woman’s struggle is shaped by the multiple […]
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Learnings from Mandala
No doubt action is adventure but the roots of action lies in learning, and learning sometimes comes with boredom. So everytime a learning bore me, I resort to action in the form of creation. Creating patterns, doodling lotuses and leaves, curves, etc., is a pass time activity for me. One evening, I was getting bored […]
There is a word in Bangla “স্থিতপ্রজ্ঞা” which means a person who stays calm, balanced or steady no matter what the situation is – good or bad. If I had to describe the woman of the mountains in one word, then it would essentially be this word. Living in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand has […]
Some Sundays are meant for rest.Some are meant for reflection.And then there are Sundays that set the tone for the entire year. We began this year with purpose, positivity, and memories that will stay with us for a long time 💚 The Yamuna River Cleanup & Forest Plog Walk, conducted in collaboration with Sanskriti Youth […]
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A Cup of Tea, A Pocketful of Curses
I was on my way back from Chennai after attending a family wedding. My route was long: Chennai → Vijayawada → Sukma. At Vijayawada, I had a connecting sleeper bus at 10:30 pm. By the time I reached, it was just 6 in the evening. Now, I have this small habit whenever I travel: if […]
As my project was primarily about increasing millet productivity, I was under the impression that millets were staple food crops which were fairly common in Uttarakhand and that my task was just to render assistance or actions that would further their availability within households. However, the situation was drastically different than what I had presumed. […]
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