A couple of weeks ago (on July 7th), we had a YEFI Day at work. YEFI stands for Yahoo! Employee Foundation India. As part of the celebrations, we got the Parikrma kids to come and visit our Yahoo! offices.

The Jayanagar children (who see me every Saturday) visited the M G Road office, and as part of Kalpana’s (one of the founders of Parikrma) plan, another colleague and myself would host the Sahakarnagar children at Aztec / EGL premises.

The kids came at around 1 o’ clock and we took them straight for lunch first. The girls came first and they sat down. The boys came in an another vehicle after a while. The Aztec cafeteria was filled with kids with green color shirts, and everyone was wondering what was going on.

First off, I asked who was the naughtiest of them all, and all of them pointed to a single girl, and I got her to explain what all naughty things she does, hehe. Apparently, she’s the only one who confidently slaps any of the naughty boys! Then, I asked their nicknames, and got to know all the names from ‘mosquito’ to ‘kogile’.

Somewhere in between, I asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up - 3 said nurse, 1 said teacher, 1 said computer scientist (whatever that is), 1 said astronaut (!), and so on. I was so happy to hear that only one of them wanted to become a “software engineer”. Maybe I’m being cynical but I think we have enough drones in Bangalore as it is. These kids can do so much more, and their motivation is very different from ours. When I asked why that paticular girl wanted to become a teacher? She said she liked kids and she wanted to help other kids just like Parikrma helped her. I was asking the wannabe-nurses on whether they have put an injection to somebody else … then I asked the ‘kogile’ to sing, and she sang a beautiful kannada song.

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