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Share My Cake – Teaching Children to Celebrate with a Difference

Year after year, we celebrate our kids’ birthdays. Year after year, we are straddled with a whole lot of gifts which we do not know what to do with. Most of the times, these are things the kid has no use for. They just clutter the house, get distributed or gather dust in the attics. [...]

February 7, 2012 / 1 Comment / Read More

Saving The Planet, One Step At A Time

December 7, 2011 No Comment

Arun Krishnamurthy is a busy man. He has, with help from his team and the eco-conservation foundations he works with, managed to cover 67 schools in three cities in just this one year. Three hundred and forty students have gotten involved in actively conserving the environment in various ways. Meanwhile, in Chennai, where Arun lives, [...]

A Student from Singapore has pledged to help people in rural India build toilets

November 29, 2011 2 Comments

When Peixin Li took up an internship in Bangalore, as part of her Social Science and Communication course at National University of Singapore, little did she know that she would, in some way, champion the cause of clean sanitation in a remote village in South India. But the 22-year-old’s experiences while traveling here and her [...]

Meet Bal Pandian: The Bird Man of Koonthakulam

July 21, 2011 No Comment

“About 3,000 birds nest here in the peak season,” pointed out Bal Pandian as I panned my camera along the graceful flight of a flock of landing pelicans. I was at the Koonthakulam Bird Sanctuary, with photographer and naturalist Balan Madhavan. Bal Pandian is an ordinary villager, but his extraordinary feats have made him a [...]

[Video] ‘The Musalman’: India’s Only Handwritten Newspaper

July 11, 2011 No Comment

‘The Musalman’ is India’s (and possibly the world’s) only handwritten newspaper. Started in the year 1927 in Chennai, the newspaper is handwritten in Urdu by skilled calligraphers. It is this love of its team for calligraphy and the Urdu language that keeps the newspaper going. This 4-page newspaper is published daily by a team of [...]

Supraja Dharini And Her Turtle Protection Super Squads

May 20, 2011 No Comment

Chennai (Women’s Feature Service) Until some years back, he would dig out the leathery, cricket-ball sized turtle eggs from their sand pits and use them to play cricket with his friends. And he was not the only one doing so in the fishing village of Periya Neelangarai on the East Coast Road (ECR), a few [...]

Are you a Paperman too?

May 11, 2011 5 Comments

Have you ever wondered what happens to the daily newspaper once you sell it to the ‘kabadi wala’? Have you ever considered what happens to the piles of rough notes that you make during exams, or the thousand of wasted office paper? Even if you haven’t, there is someone out there who did. And he [...]

ESIH 2011 Winners: Five NGOs working towards Women Empowerment

March 2, 2011 No Comment

A few months ago, we had invited entries for the Third EdelGive Social Innovation Honours 2011. EdelGive Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Edelweiss Capital Ltd. announced the winners last week! Following a stringent four stage evaluation process, 5 outstanding NGOs have been announced winners for their innovative work in the areas of Health and Well-Being, [...]

Doctor couple does wonders for tribals at Sittilingi

November 2, 2009 14 Comments

Sittilingi is a remote village in Dharmapuri district, 125 km away from Salem town in Tamil Nadu, which used to be a god forsaken land caught under the spell of quacks and black magic. Noisy drums and fake injections were all they had to cure illnesses. This is when Dr. Regi and Dr. Lalitha took [...]

BPOs Reach Rural India

April 28, 2009 9 Comments

A lot has been said of BPOs. They have changed people’s lives and brought a modicum of hope to the lesser privileged sections of society that was denied for so long. However, till now the story was mostly restricted to urban India. Thanks to the efforts of a few like an enterprising District Collector in [...]