Hi Everyone!!!

I'm Sarmistha and a new Choice intern. This is the first time I'm posting a blog and I'm happy that it starts here at Choice.

I'm interning at an NGO called Bakul Foundation in Bhubaneswar. Well its not exactly an NGO, I mean it falls into a slightly different category,as in, it doesn't have employees running around doing its work, but instead volunteers, happy to spend their time doing something meaningful than to while away their time at some coffee shop. That is how I got hooked with Bakul. The entire concept of volunteerism and people actually working without any financial motivators was very intriguing as well as exciting.

Now let me introduce you to Bakul properly. Bakul Foundation is a movement for volunteerism in Orissa. Acting on the belief that substantial change is possible when thousands get together, Bakul attempts to pool together the small individual energies of the people who want to bring about change in the society. Hence, Bakul seeks to harness the huge and largely untapped volunteerism of students, retired persons, homemakers, working people and non-resident Indians for social and environmental development.

As its first initiative, Bakul mobilized more than a thousand individuals to contribute in small ways to set up a Children's Library in Bhubaneswar. The entire library has been built and is running with small individual contributions of ordinary people without any corporate or institutional funding so far.

Bakul is also into Arts, in January 2009 Bakul, in collaboration with 'Art and Deal' magazine, New Delhi, organized the 'BAKUL ART FEST 2009' and got tremendous response from artists and public alike. I got the opportunity to co-ordinate the Art Fest. The theme of the art fest was, 'TOWARDS A NEW VIEWERSHIP/AUDIENCE' and I think to a great extent it was able to spread its message. The main focus was to reach out to people (the first time viewers) who've never had an opportunity to get introduced to the world of arts. To those who never had a gallery experience it was a new revelation all together.

The Art Fest started on 15 Jan with the preview of the Art Exhibition. Around 36 National as well as Bhubaneswar based artists came together for the first time in Bhubaneswar for this event. There were 3 elements of the Art Fest, the 'ART WALL FOR PEACE' , the 'ART EXHIBITION' and the 'VIDEO EVENINGS'. The 500 feet long 'WALL for PEACE' was painted by 300 odd people from all walks of life. Starting from the artists to art students to school children to rag pickers. There were differently abled children as well from the deaf schools and also from Open Learning System participating with equal enthusiasm. It was a sight to behold, with so many people coming up with such amazing paintings all on the theme of Peace.

The art exhibition attracted even more people as we tried even harder to reach out to people to spread our message. There was a lot of publicity in both English and Oriya newspapers and also through local TV and FM stations. A lot of people turned up by reading our article in the newspapers. We also coordinated with a lot of schools to arrange visits by students to the exhibition. Their response was over exhilarating. More than 1000 people visited the gallery and it was very satisfying to see that people could connect to art in their own various ways and the response of the school children was overwhelming.

The Video Evenings were a success too as it was a relatively new concept among the public here. It was exciting to experience different forms of expression for the first time.

The Art Fest concluded on 28th Jan and it didn't even feel that 2 weeks had passed. It was my first experience coordinating something at such a large scale. Personally I gained a lot from this experience, interactions with the artists gave me a different insight to the paintings and the entire experience also helped me develop my own outlook and approach towards arts.

I'm really happy I got such an opportunity so early on in life by Bakul and Choice.

Regards..
me...