And finally, the cultural practices that they followed as never congruent with modernity - they believed in child marriage and this, coupled with the problem of malnourishment, put a lot of strain on teenage girls of the community and affected their physical and mental well-being,” shares Revathi, who points out that with sheer dedication and the use of innovative teaching methods, she and her team were able to get around most of these problems. Yet another issue was the underdevelopment of the children’s limbs due to the fact that the mothers would carry them on their bodies in a sling all day when they went begging. Secondly, we knew we could not put them with other ‘normal’ children in the same class as they were more prone to violence because they came from a world where survival of the fittest reigns supreme. Because of this, other children would never treat them properly and this always pulled them away from the education system. And as these communities were largely nomadic in nature, the attention span of the children was also low when compared to other children. Even if some of them had, they had dropped out. “One of the main challenges was getting the children interested to come to school as traditionally, no members of these communities ever went to school. As ambitious as her aims were, the challenges that accompanied appeared to be major roadblocks too, at least in the beginning. All Revathi had mind were three aims - educate the children, give them nutritious food and get them out of begging so that they could slowly integrate into society and become active, responsible citizens. When she first began, there was no structured roadmap in place. The first batch consisted of 35 students from both the tribal communities.
And this gave way to the formation of the Vanavil Trust in 2005, which first started out as a school and rented out space in Vellur village, Nagapattinam. We helped them get the necessary materials via the district administration and were almost on our way when we learnt that the girl whom we had followed, Lakshmi, had succumbed to malnutrition,” Revathi reminisces, adding that this incident shook her to her very core and that’s why she decided to get involved with the children in tribal communities like the Boom Boom Mattukaran and the Narikuravar, as she believed they deserved a better future than the one they had in store for them. That’s how they had been earning their livelihood for generations.
“Not only were they not a part of the relief network, the women and the children were also actively involved in begging. To understand her family background and where she's coming from, Revathi and a few other volunteers followed the child until they discovered 43 families belonging to the Boom Boom Mattukaran community, a group of nomadic tribal people, in an otherwise isolated park. I remember thinking ‘What is the need for this child to beg now?’,” she explains. This alarmed me because at that point, Nagapattinam was overflowing with relief materials and we believed that we had reached almost everybody in need. She was carrying an emaciated infant, who clearly looked malnourished. “I met a child at the Nagapattinam bus stand who was begging for money. Later, it was when she had started working with the children who had been affected by the disaster -making sure that they were very much a part of the relief network by getting relief materials for them too - that an incident occurred that would change the course of her life and career forever. That’s how I got there and at first, I was involved in clearing dead bodies that had piled up along the shore,” recalls Revathi grimly. “As a former journalist with many friends still active in the media, I got to know that Nagapattinam was the worst affected among all the districts in Tamil Nadu and that there was a requirement for more volunteers to join the relief efforts. Among them was Revathi Radhakrishnan, who was working in the film industry as an associate director with Gautham Vasudev Menon. In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami that wreaked havoc in many parts of South India, scores of concerned people from all walks of life had actively participated in the rehabilitation of the affected populations.
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