Communities in the city

Those stories show community in villages. Community exists in cities too, though it may work a little differently.

More than 20 years ago, in a part of Ahmedabad (Gujarat), Kamal Parmar, who owned a small auto-fabrication workshop, noticed a group of poor children on the street. Some had dropped out of school; others had never been. Kamal began giving them tuition from 5:30 to 9:30 pm every day, after his own work hours, and gave them a free dinner too. Four hours of teaching every day, after a full day's work!

Soon 150 children were coming regularly and were deeply interested in the lessons.

A few teachers from a local school noticed and joined in for a while. One said: 'These children don't get proper benches to sit on, have no 'silence zone' classrooms and the vehicles passing by make lots of noise, yet they pay all their attention to what the teachers tell them. This touched my heart.'

Some older children from regular schools also came to teach as volunteers. One of them said: 'We went there to teach, instead we learnt a lot from them.'

New kinds of community have also appeared in the last 30 or 40 years. Residents' Welfare Associations in many cities make their own rules: about waste, keeping common areas clean, looking after pets, and so on. The residents themselves take part in making these rules.

Communities depend on each other. The same Residents' Welfare Association depends on traders for supplies and on municipal workers to handle waste. In our complex societies, everyone depends on many other people and communities.

So 'community' is a flexible idea. A jāti, or a part of one, is often called a community. So is a group sharing a religion, region, kind of work or interest: Mumbai's Parsi community, Chennai's Sikh community, America's Indian community, Kerala's scientific community, your school's art community, the village's farming community. The list is endless! And at school you belong to several at once: your class, the sports community, the National Service Scheme, the National Cadet Corps, a science or drama club.