Dr. Abraham George
speaker
275 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Abraham George’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, the school has equal number of boys and girls, and they live in the same campus. The girls' dorm is hardly a couple of hundred yards away from the boys. The reason is that we want them to grow up from a very young age. They're familiar with each other, and so that when they are set free and go to colleges and so on, they don't have these unnecessary notions about the other sex.
so the children think of girls think of themselves as just as smart as just as good as boys they think of each other as brothers and sisters though i will admit that there is a lot of romance sometimes there's nothing you can avoid something you can't avoid at teenage years but that's all fine and we Make sure it doesn't get out of control. So they grow up.
By the time they go to college, they have mutual respect. If a boy addresses a girl in a demeaning way, he's in big trouble. So, in fact, the girls, many people complain are... I mean, they're stronger than the boys in some respects. So it's fun. There's no problem at all when you bring them up together and let them know that they are both equal.
We realized that, oh, I was of the opinion, reading literature and so on, you cannot bring about major change unless in their personality, their character, and even their education, unless you take them at a very young age. And so we take them when they are three and a half, four years of age. So at a given time, only 30 children are taken. And every year it has to grow.
And right now there are over 300 children in one school and we just started the second school. There are 60 children in the second school. That will also grow into 320 children. So altogether there'll be 600 plus children in both schools combined.
Definitely, definitely. I initially started with Shanti Bhavan, which is the school for children from deprived communities. But as I got going, I realized there are so many interrelated problems. For example, The women in the villages, they were extremely poor. They didn't have jobs. They were working for landlords. So I started a banana cultivation of almost 200 acres.
We were harvesting tons and tons of bananas. Unfortunately, the rain stopped with climate change and everything, and I got into trouble there. Then I realized that one of the reasons for poverty is bad governance. And I felt that maybe I should start a postgraduate journalism college. And so we built the facilities and it turned out to become the best journalism postgraduate college in India.
Then I was doing that, I realized that people, the villagers have to travel a long way to get medical care and there is nothing close by, so I started a hospital close by. Like that, one after the other. But one of the most important things I did was in the area of lead poisoning. The cities were suffering from pollution, and lead was one of the major pollutants in the late 90s.
And so I went to World Bank and others and CDC, and they trained me on that, and I brought equipment and did some 20,000 children. Lead test was done. And that led to a conference at which we persuaded the oil companies to come. And they came and announced that within a year and a half, they will introduce unleaded gasoline. And today, India is unleaded.
So I got myself into so many projects with my own money. And in some ways, it was a mistake. And I also thought that the properties I brought by the beachfront, there are only so many properties by the beachfront, so it'll never go down in value. Well, Katrina came along and then... The subprime crisis came along and all the values of properties fell by more than 50%.
So all my investment in real estate went to docks. And then stock market collapsed on me. And so one thing after another is a cascade. And I lost a great significant part of my wealth. And in the meantime, I was spending millions of dollars here in India, and I realized that I couldn't sustain it.
So I started selling everything and sold all my property, including my house in America, and put it into running the institutions here without closing many of them. One or two, I reduced the staffing. and kept it going. While my son, my older of the two boys, Ajit, he left his work and joined me in starting a fundraising effort. And miraculously, within two, three years, he found success.
People were willing to listen to his story. Maybe because I had already done quite a bit of work in this area and people felt convinced that I'm doing something honestly. And therefore, since 2010, we started receiving a lot of donations. And today, we are stronger than ever. In some ways, what happened to me was a blessing in disguise. The school and all the projects are not mine alone.
It's owned by, in theory, it's owned by everyone who contributed. contributes to it. So in that sense, I brought the community of well-wishers to a cause that meant something for them too, not just a personal project. And I think that's a way to do it. Try to do it all by yourself.
Even if you have money, it's not necessarily the right way to do it because you want to attract ideas and criticisms and everything else. And you have someone to report to. the board and make sure that you keep yourself honest.
Absolutely. One of the pressing issues in my mind is that in the next 10, 15 years, I have to transition to the next set of managers, next set of people whom I train and so on. So we already started on that. My son is there, but he cannot do it himself. The same thing he has to have many people surround him who will do a good job. And honestly, so the transition is just as important.
You have to recognize that you don't live forever. So I'm working on that.
Absolutely correct. For a magical reason, one of the Academy Award winners, Vanessa Roth, discovered us. And she said she would like to spend time, send us the camera crew and all of that, and she herself, and shoot. And she was shooting both boys and girls. And she realized that she needs to track them. You can't just take a snapshot and forget about it. So she kept going.
And after a while, this camera crew was living with us, literally. And we didn't even think of them as part of some outside force. They were there. Everything we did, they were shooting. And they collected a story, which we didn't know what it was. And the day before Netflix released, they asked us to come for a showing. That was the first time we saw the film.
And so when you see this Daughters of Destiny, you realize that There is nothing staged, no acting. It was just the true story. Children's voice, our voice, neighbors' voice, parents' voice, everything in there, the hard truth. And that's why this film became very popular all over. And so that is the history of these seven years of shooting.
Showing 81–100 of 275 · page 5 of 14
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