Gutter

Last week, at a summit where a handful of nonprofits had gathered, someone asked me a question I’ve heard many times before, from people much closer to me too.

“You’re young. Why are you doing this? Why nonprofit? How is this even a career? Why not engineering, medicine, something that actually pays?”

I’ve never had a clean answer to that question. Some of my closest friends still don’t fully understand why I chose this. But that day, while trying to explain it to a near-stranger, I ended up explaining it to myself for the first time.

Here’s what I told them.

The gutter

I have a close friend, one of the founding members of Apnipathshala, who lives in a chawl not far from our office.

Right in front of his home, cutting straight through the narrow lane between the buildings, runs an open gutter. A nala.

I know that gutter. Not his, but my own version of it.

Six, seven, eight years ago, I lived in a chawl too. There was a gutter maybe two steps from my front door. As a kid, I didn’t think about it, I just ran the way kids run, and I fell into it. Again. And again. And again.

Four or five years back, I got my first computer. It came from Dr. Malpani, from what people like to call “charity” or “nonprofit work.” And that, quietly, was the moment I started moving away from that gutter.

Today I live somewhere decent. There’s still a gutter nearby, there always is, but my home is a little further from it now. I won’t pretend the smell is gone. Some days it still reaches me. But it isn’t two steps away anymore.

Standing outside my friend’s home that day, looking at his gutter, I wasn’t really looking at his life. I was looking at mine, a few years back, rewound. It’s strange how a smell can do that to you, pull you straight back into a body you thought you’d outgrown. For a second I was that kid again, not thinking about falling, just running, because that’s what kids do. It took me a while, standing there, to separate what I was feeling for him from what I was actually feeling for myself.

Why this matters

Here’s the thing I realized while trying to explain myself at that summit: I think 95% of the people in this country are living some version of this. Born next to the gutter. Growing up around it. Or spending their whole lives trying to get far enough away from it.

Most of us at Apnipathshala are people who lived close to it. A few of us were right on top of it. And bit by bit, we’re figuring out our way away from it, not because we were exceptional, but because somewhere along the way, someone chose to trust us.

A random older man believed a scared kid could learn to use a computer. A few friends believed an idea was worth building. That trust is the only reason any of this started working.

So when I think about what Apnipathshala, Eklavya, and everything else we’re building actually does, this is what it comes down to: we might be one small part of the reason 50,000 students right now, and maybe someday many more, get to move a little further from their own gutter. I could be wrong.

This could all fail. Or it could turn into something bigger than I can picture right now. But that’s the lens I see it through.

I don’t say this to sound like I’ve figured something out that others haven’t. I haven’t. Most days I’m just as unsure as anyone else about whether any of this is working the way we hope. But there’s a difference between not being sure and not trying. I got a shot that most kids around that gutter never get, and the only honest thing I know to do with that shot is spend it trying to hand it to someone else.

Why I don’t take a break

Somewhere out there, someone is trying to claw their way out of that gutter completely alone, the way I once was. I got lucky. I got pulled out, and now I get to spend my time pulling others out too.

When I think about it that way, a holiday stops feeling like something I’m owed and starts feeling like time I’d be spending on myself while there’s still so much work left to do. It’s not that rest is bad, or that I think anyone else should live like this. It’s just that when you’ve been handed a chance like this, one that could genuinely move thousands of kids away from where you once stood, it’s hard to feel the pull of a day off.

So when someone asks me why I don’t switch off, why I’m reachable at odd hours, why weekends look the same as weekdays to me, I don’t really have a dramatic answer. I just think about the version of me that used to fall into that gutter without noticing, and about all the kids right now who are living that exact moment. How am I supposed to sit still with that picture in my head? How is anyone supposed to feel tired when the work in front of them is literally someone else’s way out?

That’s really the whole answer. Not ambition, not a hustle story. Just a debt I’m trying to repay, one kid at a time.