Tags
arranged marriage, Dream A Dream Bangalore, lack of creativity in India, patriarchal society in India, Ride that Pony game
Have you ever played “Ride the Pony”? Let me rephrase that. Have you ever played “Ride the Pony” with thirty-four 15-year old Indians?
Ride the Pony, Ride the Pony,
Ride the Pony, Ride the Pony….
This is how we ride!
Front-to-Front-to-Front, Oh baby
Back-to-back-to-back, Oh baby
Side-to-side-to-side, Oh baby
This is how we ride! (repeat from top)
The song commences with the group skipping in a big circle and pauses momentarily for booty dancing with a partner at “Front-to-front-to-front”. (Rhythmic arm action a must during booty dancing). Skipping ensues as the song repeats. A new partner is found for next round of booty dancing.
15-year old Americans wouldn’t be caught dead playing “Ride that Pony”. They are too cool to Ride, and let’s be honest, too cool for most things. When they get to college at age 18 or 19, they may finally be ready to revert back to childhood, taking the form of the occasional evening dressed as a pregnant nun, Annie Oakley in a slumber sack , or the Great Gatsby’s Ms. Daisy Buchanan. What about all those times you were dressed up without the slightest idea what you were, in college or otherwise. One thing for sure, you probably weren’t short of ideas every time someone asked you.
But what if you were? What if you’d never before played make-believe or your entire schooling had been based on regurgitation rather than originality? What if life existed without imagination and your college years devoid of a versatile slumber sack?
At the Dream a Dream outdoor experiential camp a few weeks back, 10th standard students from the Round Table School not only reveled in “Ride that Pony” but for the first time in their lives were asked to pretend. It was an invitation to step outside the tiny worlds that they know so well and create art from trash, “Rivers of Life” and “Dream Trees”. It was a time to pass around an imaginary weightless ball and a stick that became your heart’s desire. It was a weekend of improvised statues, birdcalls, and fashion runway ‘trainees’. It was eight straight meals of rice with no fork or spoon offered. It was 3 facilitators, 4 staff members, and 3 volunteers (myself included), and a safe space to grow, aspire, and be as they had never before been.
With nearly 6 months of IDEX social enterprise hypnosis under my belt with high frequency buzzwords like “impact assessment” and “sustainability” constantly looming overhead, I left the weekend’s retreat a tad disenchanted, with particular respect to the camp’s 25 (of 34) female participants. The reality is that 45 percent of these girls will be destined for marriage before they turn 18. Despite newfound liberalism and a percolation of “Westernism among the upper crust, rural India and urban lower classes are today still defined by a deeply conservative patriarchal culture. Irrespective of a weekend of self-exploration and exposure to a future beyond that which they know, most girls have little leeway when it comes to arranged marriage and early termination of their education.
Despite industrious efforts to breed independent ambitious visionaries among India’s underprivileged youth, it’ll take far more than Dream a Dream camps, soccer, life skills, and creative arts programs to trump entrenched archaic tradition like that which characterizes India. Which brings me to the broader question — How much leverage does social enterprise have as a whole within the context of deeply rooted cultural traditions and practices? Three days of dreaming at camp may not be a clear-cut ticket to economic opportunity and a life beyond that of a homemaker, but Riding the Pony (hopefully while wearing a slumber sack) is certainly a good place to start :).