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
Television with a Conscience is an Academy Emmy Award, yes.
Well, I am on your show. That itself is a privilege.
If you have the money, You must be willing to spend a good portion of it and create the infrastructure, create the base for it that others can appreciate. But if you don't have the money, you need to, right from the start, you need to partner with someone who has some money. Without money, it's a little hard. I'm not saying it's impossible. If you are a very highly motivating person, you can
maybe start fundraising even before you have anything to show. But that's a big challenge. You will have to work for some other NGO and be part of their organization. Starting something of your own with no money in your pocket or very little money in your pocket, it's a big challenge. I wouldn't advise anyone to do that.
Find a partnership organization or join a group of people who have deep pockets and say to them, listen, you have the money. I have the commitment. I will deliver what we both agree on. Help me and show from the start that you will do what you promised.
I am amazed that you should know so much about India. that I don't have to tell you. But anyway, what you observed is correct. Once you come out of the major cities like Bangalore and hardly 20 kilometers, everything, there is no infrastructure at all. People are living in huts. The roads are full of potholes. and no real shops and so on.
So when I first discovered this piece of land in this village, there was no electricity. There was no water supply. The telephone lines, some cell phone would work from the top of some hill. That's where I started. And there were no roads properly. And I had to do almost everything. We decided to use solar power. In fact, the British Petroleum, which had solar panels, we bought from them.
And later on, when we started running the entire school on solar, 30 years ago, when nobody was talking about solar, the British Petroleum came and took a film and showed it at G8 summit where President Ellison and President Clinton were having their summit. So a little historic footnote about our solar effort. And telephone lines got improved over time as the cell phone industry got going.
And water, we have deep wells. Some of those wells go down as deep as 1,000 feet. We have a whole lot of wells, and we pump the wells. And today we pump the water out with solar panels. So again, we are not using electricity from the public service. So you find solutions. And then the road, the nearest four or five kilometers to our school was impossible to navigate with all those potholes.
So after trying for five years, trying to get the government to do something, they weren't doing. So we just had to spend the money and build the road, tarred road. That's how we got here. So we overcame many hurdles, but that's part of living in a remote area. And if you find solutions one by one, you will be able to move forward.
Yes, absolutely. You have to be patient, especially in rural areas, trying to de-government. Nothing happens sometimes. You just can't get frustrated. Contractors don't want to work in remote rural areas. There are so many hurdles you have to overcome. The solar panel is a perfect example where we didn't have to rely on too many people to buy from British Petroleum.
put them up and it produces energy. So some solutions are much easier.
Shilpa is one of the great sexist stories coming from one of the poorest. Her father is an elephant chaser. That's why her book is called The Elephant Chaser's Daughter. The elephants come into his village and he's asked to chase them away by the government by bursting crackers. A lot of them get killed too. But anyway, they were living in utter poverty. But this girl was really smart.
And she went on to take two masters and come to Hofstra University for her PhD. This is her last year, sixth year, clinical psychology. She'll be a doctor next year. And she wrote this marvelous book. It is Fit the Elephant Chase's Daughter, which is right now, I think in Kindle, it's running like 4.6 out of a score of five in ranking. So she's one.
There are other kids whose mother burned herself because she was raped by some people. And we picked him up and did some plastic surgery and things like that. And he's now a a middle-level manager in a technology company. There are others who were orphaned. There's one girl who was an orphan, and we took her and we got her through her college. And today she's somewhere in, I believe, in Dubai.
She is running a real estate firm. So they've gone into different things, some in technology, some in psychology, some in business and so on. They are in Google, they are in Amazon, they are in Microsoft, they are in ExxonMobil.
Every company would like to take them when they go for interview because our children display a certain level of self-confidence, their communication skills are excellent, and they are humble. So the combination of all these things and intercommunication skills are high. So all combination of these things make them very attractive and they get hired.
And they compete with other students from well-to-do families and our kids get selected. Now, you pointed out that, and now there are 12 of them in the last three years joined American colleges in full scholarship. Just to name a few, Princeton, University of Chicago, Stanford, Duke, Middlebury, I don't know. There are 12 of them. And this year we have another five.
We're expecting them to get over 95% in SAT and do well in interviews and the essays and get on merit. The lesson, John, if I can tell the audience, this is this. This is one of the most rewarding parts of my work. And that is that you take children from this absolute poverty and transform them for good enough to be in Princeton or Stanford or any of these places I've mentioned.
How is it possible? People asked me and I said, nothing magical. You just got to bring them up right, give them lots of love and caring and provide an excellent education, instill self-confidence in them and their communication skills and try to make them as honest as possible and kind and caring.
Showing 101–120 of 275 · page 6 of 14
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