Harish Palaniappan's

It was my first candle light thing.. and it was lovely.. with not one love, but many lovely people. not just a few, but more than a hundred candles.. not in a hotel, but in besant nagar beach, chennai.

It was a candle light vigil organized by 'Youth for social change' and 'Association for India's development', two NGO's, along with a bunch of lovely supporters and friends.

The event was organized today, the 138th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birthday.

The day was aptly utilized to express support for, and to highlight the high suicide deaths among Indian farmers in the current decade.

It also tried to make people aware of, and think about state of farmers in places like vidharbha, Maharashtra.

I relate it to a romantic candle light dinner.. because, the love and genuine affection these people showed in organizing the event and running the show was infectious, and I carried back home a little more love for this country and the people.

There was another group of people participating.. who had come from kancheepuram. These people mostly women and one small boy, sung street songs 'gaana' style with lyrics highlighting problems farmers faced.

Though some of the lines of the 'gaana' songs sung, or the comments people voiced, took a rough anti-capitalistic approach at times, it was a message of awareness well delivered at the end of the day.

Interesting things were:
They read out 138 names of farmers who committed suicide in the vidharbha region .. more had died, but they read out 138 because it was the 138th birth anniversary of Gandhi on this day the 2nd october.

And as they read out each name, somebody took a candle and put it in a curve which later became a nice circle of candles. .with all of us sitting around it observing 10 minutes of silence.

There was considerable media coverage for the initial stages of the event.. from some local newspapers and TV channels.. including some coverage from NDTV. Probably, this should be on TV tomorrow.

They had planned out well. I later understood from a member(Rohit shetty) of the group which planned the event, that they planned the event in a short time, which is one big reason i think it was infectiously successful. It seems they finalized plans only over the night of 1st October finishing off at 2am in the wee hours on 2nd October.
Also, I and many others felt and could see that people were just getting to taking some part of the work of organizing the event and doing it with real-time planning rather than planning for days of months, or planning press briefings well in advance. The guys who spoke to the press both in English or Tamil spoke their mind and were instantaneous rather than having that air of addressing the press and being on television or newspapers.

They used simple banners on charts with messages written down by hand.. both in English and the local language Tamil. They had a big cloth banner painted with the message and stuck on bamboo sticks.
Why all this banner thing was interesting for me? you might ask.. simply because they seem to have given more importance to the message rather than the banners.

I am not a great fan of the Gandhian way of handling problems.. but I do believe that the Gandhian way is always better than doing the thing that I do often.."Nothing / Nothing but talking".

So, it was a great candle light dinner.. minus the dinner.. plus a cause for expressing solidarity to farmers committing suicide in our own small way.

"I love Indian people.. and their attitude".

I think before today, given my critique-attitude towards problems I see everyday in India, I have never even thought about saying something like that...

All this drives me further more, to learn about and do some social work or show more social responsibility towards issues in my city / state / country.

.. And this event was organized worldwide by aidindia.org, other than Chennai.. also in Pune, Mumbai, Bhopal.. and close to 200 cities in the US they say.

If you want to: You can sign the online petition they are planning to submit to the Prime Minister of India highlighting this issue, and asking for action.

More pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/varun21482/FightForTheFarmer