Bhumi - Story of people - Part#1

Where Bhumi is today is the collaboration, care and ownership of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of others who shaped our destiny. Superficially, it's easy to look at Bhumi as having built by one person or just a handful of people. But that's very far from the truth.

When we start naming people, the risk of missing someone is always there. I acknowledge my memory isn't perfect and there was so much I didn't know because of the decentralised nature of our organisation and my own immaturity. Yet, to not give credit where it's due is unfair and I'm going to attempt it. If you do notice any mistakes, gaps it's not personal, please do point them out.

I've already shared a lot about Ayyanar, Gyan & Hari.

Anurag Shrivatsava who seeded the idea that led to us registering Bhumi was the oldest among us and Gyan had advised that it would be best if he were the founding president when we registered the organisation. Punit Vanjani used to work at an IT company and was associated until he left Chennai a year or two later.

Prakash Selvaraj was then a student, active member of Leo Club always brimming with passion, ideas and questions. When I took up national responsibilities. Prakash along with Hari took up the responsibility of coordinating the chapter. While Hari coordinated the Bala Mandir centre, Prakash used to coordinate Pudupettai. Much more about Prakash in the coming months.

Apart from Gyan, there were three others from IIT Madras. Manish Kumar Pathak, a UG student, was one of the coordinators of the group when I joined and used to host some of the meetings at IIT Madras. Swaminathan Subramanian was a PhD Scholar and Raghav Venkatesan a UG student were friends and were part of many of our activities including Pudupettai.

The ten of us were the founding signatories when we registered Bhumi as a non-profit society.

Purnendu Singh used to be very active online and helped recruited many volunteers. It's quite possible that he may have recruited me too :) Purnendu who was not in town when we registered Bhumi was part of projects like computer education, RTI and continues to play a small but significant role to this date

There were many others like Indumathi, Vasudha, Makarand, Karthikeyan, Badri, Arun, Karthik, Vijay

A favourite quote that used to be on my email signature for many years then sums it up "Never Doubt That A Small Group Of Thoughtful Committed Citizens Can Change The World: Indeed It'S The Only Thing That Ever Has" Margaret Mead. If anything, Bhumi is a story of people.

 

Have you done something with a group of people, all of you should be feeling proud of? Leave a comment.

 

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