A fellowship for Mr. Mutyalappa ? (long post!)

Quite a while back I had talked about one of the more capable people who worked at Timbaktu. The post is here and I'm pasting a snippet here:

The guy I mentioned above is quite a remarkable chap and 'discovering' him was something of a high point of the trip. He stands out quite quickly in a crowd due to his abilities and drive. Earlier he was involved with several things including the People's War Group and politics (he was close to Paritala Ravi for those familiar with Andhra politics), but finally found a niche for himself at Timbaktu.

I have been wanting to do an update on him and make the proposal that I am making below, and finally getting around to doing it.

So Mutyalappa (the guy I talked about above) is quite a remarkable chap as I said above. He's a natural leader with a very strong personality (and something of a drinker too and hotheaded, someone who can't suffer fools gladly). He is a completely local person with very little outside exposure, nevertheless he's very smart. You get the sense that he is going to go places. Even before I was asked to work with him formally on a couple of the projects, he instinctively gravitated towards me and spent some time getting to know me etc, though not in a 'suck=up' way. I think it was like an instinctive curiousity about how the outside world is, what do people do how do they progress etc. He wheedled an answer from me about how much I had been making at my previous job, stuff that I don't like to talk about at Timbaktu. People like him are rarely in social work as they gravitate towards other more, shall we say .. coercive .. methods of getting things done and making money. However, in his case, somehow, perhaps due to early influences from good people, he comes across as genuinely keen to solve some social problems even if there is no personal benefit involved. His approach probably would be rather less consensus-driven than I would prefer, but that's all right.

He did a whole bunch of roles at Timbaktu and did well at all of them and at the time I started going there, I was wondering if the organization would manage to keep him interested and focussed. As if on cue, he impulsively decided to run for 'sarpanch'-ship of his village. This is quite remarkable from a couple of reasons: 1 - he comes from a caste (boyya -- goatherds I believe) that has traditionally been backwards and under the thumb of one or the other of the more powerful castes. 2 - sarpanch elections have become pretty corrupt, politicised and money-laden in Anantapur. Usually only the powerful with lots of money stand and throw a lot of money around (liquor, lots of goat and chicken) and buy their way to the post, and then try to misappropriate money alloted for work in the village. Basically a microcosm of the national political scene though more distressing that even at the most micro level the rot has gone deep. So it was quite astonishing that he decided to stand for election, kind of the way it would be for someone we know to stand for election as an MLA or MP. People at Timbaktu were quite surprised that he did it. There was some background there, people asked his brother to stand for election, but he had more than 2 kids and the rules in AP prohibit people with more than 2 kids from standing for sarpanch (! that sounds unconstitutional to me), so he decided to go ahead and do it. Having decided, he is not one for half measures so he went ahead and spent a fair amount of money on said booze and non-veg (another interesting expenditure is to pay for the travel costs of people who have migrated from the village to Bangalore or wherever, to come to the village on election day and vote!). But I believe he managed to keep his campaign basically clean in that he didn't get indebted to anyone or seek help from people who would later come back and ask him to do favours for me. He won the election.

So now he is in a position to do something really good for his village. And its very very rare to have an opportunity like this where a smart, educated strong competent person with integrity intact and a background in social work is elected. Its possible he could do a fantastic job and then go on to become a leader at a higher level (the sarpanch term is for 3 or perhaps more years, which is enough time to do something substantial). However he is now quite deeply in debt and the position comes with a paltry honorarium of 2500/- or so a month. So to me this is like a very 'unfolding in real time' situation. This guy could go either way I feel, with his huge debt on one side and his drive to do something good on the other.

So we come to the final point: I think an intervention to help him out at this point might be crucial. If he gets some help to tide him through financially, that may be what keeps him on the 'right' side of the fence. I seriously wanted to send this mail a long time back, but it got lost in bunch of things, including my own diffidence to try this kind of intervention. But recently in talking to Mary, she said that she was trying to organize a fellowship for him, for pretty much the same reasons, though she did not put it in quite the stark either-or way that I did above. So with that confluence of ideas I thought I should really write up this post.

So my proposal is: are there people reading this who would be interested in contributing money towards a fellowship for him for a year. There are lots of details (like we would expect some specific output for the fellowship) but they can be worked out. The size of the amount -- my guess is 3000 to 5000 per month is a decent amount. If a few people put together fairly small amounts (esp. if the small amounts are in dollars!) it should be possible to cobble this together.

If you are interested please mail me directly or add a comment on the website whichever you feel appropriate.