Behind the Scenes of "Wow! What's that sound?"

“I want to be...I want to study English really well and I want to have a big company, a big computer company and employ lots of people.” --Chandru, 4th standard (translated from Tamil)

Chandru is in the 4th standard and studies at a government aided Tamil-medium school in Chennai. He can barely read and write in English, yet he has been studying it for four years. He is one of the child artists in the pilot episode of the educational English DVD series Aid India’s English team released on Tuesday, December 8th in Chennai at Madras Terrace House.

Chandru’s father is an auto driver and his mom is a domestic helper. They live in a slum a 10-minute walk from Aid India’s office. Driving or walking on the main road, you wouldn’t know the slum existed. It is set back off the main road, down a side street. Turn right at the small stall and enter a narrow dark alley, you’ve reached the slum. Chennai has some very visible slum areas, especially near the river and the beach, but nothing like I’ve seen in India’s other major metropolitans. Most of Chennai’s slums are hidden and integrated into almost every neighborhood, but just behind that alley you always pass and dare not look into. Around that corner that houses a garbage heap. And inside that old dilapidated building that used to be a Café Coffee Day. It’s there...down there. Just around that dark corner, hidden, yet in plain sight if you look for it.

I first visited Chandru’s house after our first day of shooting. I escorted him home, except that I ended up chasing him home because he didn’t want to be bothered with adults accompanying him. He undoubtedly knows the area and all the people living in it like the back of his hand. Yet I felt a responsibility to walk him home. Just as we turned off the main street he took off running. I was shouting asking him to stop, slow down, wait for us...please. It was no use. He just kept turning around and waving, thinking he had seen the last of us. But we didn’t give up; we would make sure he made it home. At the corner of the small stall, a group of guys started giving rude looks and making comments about me (a blonde foreign woman) being there. We asked where Chandru’s house was. Immediately they switched on their best polite gentlemen appearance and walked us down the narrow dark lane, stepping over people lounging in the path, inching between water pumps and houses, and weaving between the odd chicken, crying toddler and woman beating clothes. After turning down several even narrower and darker lanes, we reached a group of young men surrounding Chandru asking him about his new status as a movie star. After one day of shooting, he was already famous.

The next day while I was escorting Chandru home, a male colleague from the office accompanied me for safety. We held onto the strap on Chandru’s backpack so he wouldn’t run off this time. The third night our shooting ran very late and we were taking Chandru home after 11pm. Three of us walked him home, two ladies, one man...and I, the foreigner, was the only one that knew how to get in and get out of the slum, the only known face to Chandru’s neighbors. It was only after we had dropped off Chandru, apologized to his mom for keeping him late and we were safely back out on the main road that I got scolded for having ever walked him home. Ignorance is definitely bliss in this scenario. While my colleagues could understand the passing comments as I walked through the slum, I was unaware, not of the comments, but of the content of the comments. I can choose naïveté and boldly ignore such situations. I’m never 100% comfortable walking down dark alleys in any country, but I have never felt unsafe in Chennai. As a foreigner, perhaps I should be more cautious. However, it is precisely my naïveté and my lack of certain cultural knowledge that allows me the privilege of accepting unknown circumstances without judgment. However, my colleagues were too aware of the situation, and I hazard a guess that next time, they will send someone else to drop him.

It’s the feeling of being so at home with your environment and surroundings that seemingly difficult situations become easy to navigate. And yet, it is being far from home that allows expats access to new and different experiences. It is a complicated juxtaposition between (some level of) cultural integration and knowing that total acceptance by the host culture will never be achieved. Both come with privileges and restrictions attached to them that require constant negotiation—the basis for a unique, interesting and constantly challenging expat life.

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The Ready to Read program of Eureka Child (the education initiative of Aid India) is producing an English language DVD series. The DVD series is an integral component of the Ready to Read program because it provides necessary audio-visual support by encouraging students to practice speaking, listening, reading and singing in English. This bilingual, Tamil-English, DVD will contain 12 episodes threaded together by a group of students, their traveling magician friend and a forest creature. Each episode will introduce the characters to English sounds, reading activities, new vocabulary and original songs.

In addition to providing the educational context and reasons behind why we made the pilot, this short behind the scenes documentary includes interviews with the child artists, entertaining video snippets, bloopers and behind the scenes outtakes. We are hoping to transform this pilot episode into a 12 episode educational DVD series as soon as we secure additional funding.

Behind the Scenes of "Wow! What's that sound?" from Kirsten Anderson on Vimeo.

Wow! What's that sound? - A 5 minute teaser from Kirsten Anderson on Vimeo.

You can also find Ready to Read's DVD initiative on kickstarter.com.

Once complete, the DVD series will be a key component in Eureka Child’s English program and will be distributed to rural schools across the state. The program will have an initial reach of 250 schools, or approximately 20,000 children in rural Tamil Nadu. Our objective is to increase the number of students who can read sentences in 5th standard to 50% from 16%, an increase of 200%. We plan to extend our outreach to interested schools and will partner with other NGOs. In addition it will be available to the general public through Eureka Books.

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It is exactly students like Chandru, his friends at his Tamil-medium school, and his peers in his neighborhood that the Ready to Read program and the DVD series is targeting. Improving the quality and content of second language instruction as well as increasing the exposure to the second language must be a focus at vernacular-medium schools. Without bilingual education, students will never have the chance to achieve their dreams: to become an IAS officer, a police officer, a teacher or to own a own computer company.

This project and getting to know students like Chandru, enable me to call this my home, thousands of miles from the home I grew up knowing.

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Kirsten Anderson has extended her AIF fellowship at Aid India’s Eureka Child, a Tamil Nadu based education initiative working to improve the quality of education for all children across the state. Kirsten has been developing the content and printed materials for the primary English reading curriculum, Ready to Read, as well as working on the production of the pilot episode of the new educational English DVD series.