The Hindu Business Line : Flying high

Chhotu Mian, just over eight years, is the star attraction on stage as he expertly mouths his dialogues from Alibaba and the Forty Thieves. He is playing Alibaba's `wife' and his face is all made up; it hardly matters that his dupatta keeps straying and his bindi is a tad askew.

His comrades — a bunch of 50-odd children — applaud his performance thunderously, especially when Chhotu yells at his cowering `husband'. At the end of the performance, a woman in a pilot's uniform strides up to the stage and congratulates Chhotu.

For many underprivileged children like Chhotu, `didi' or Captain Indraani Singh, 42, has brought sunshine into their otherwise drab lives by setting up Literacy India, a Gurgaon-based NGO.

Started in 1996, the NGO began with five children. It currently benefits 800 children — 200 girls and 600 boys — whose parents are daily wage earners from the surrounding seven villages of Palam Vihar.

Apart from providing children with education, clothes and nutritious mid-day meals, the NGO also imparts vocational training and involves children in creative activities such as drama and theatre.

Some of the older children have even found employment with corporates, export houses and hotels, and earn between Rs 2,000 and Rs 3,000 a month.

Indraani, who holds a record for being Asia's first woman pilot to fly an Airbus 300 and is one of Indian Airlines' senior-most woman commanders, put her personal funds into the project to get it going initially.

She even made paintings and sold them to art galleries to channel money into the organisation.

Then there was the task of convincing parents, for whom it was a toss-up between sending their children to school or letting them earn a daily wage. Indraani and her volunteers convinced them that a short-term income would have to be sacrificed for a better future for their children. "It certainly wasn't a cakewalk," she recalls, "but I was determined to make a go of it."

Determination has been her hallmark from the time she dreamt of flying as a child. Unfortunately, opportunities for aspiring women pilots during the 1980s were zilch. "There were no financial resources or scholarships to see us through."

But since she was a first-rate NCC cadet in college and the winner of the `best glider pilot' competition at Delhi's Palam Airport, she was able to bag a trainee pilot's position at Indian Airlines (IA) after her graduation.

There was no grounding the plucky pilot thereafter. She went on to clock a record 7,500 flying hours by extensively flying Boeing 737s and 747s before switching to Airbus 300s and 320s in the mid-1990s.

In fact, when she went to Toulouse, France, for her Airbus training programme in 1995, the European pilots were shocked that an Asian woman could clock so many flying hours in such a short span of time.

But despite stellar professional achievements, 15 years of non-stop flying at IA and a fulfilling personal life (she is married to an IA pilot and has a 13-year-old son), Indraani felt a desperate need to give something back to society.

"I thought bringing smiles on the faces of underprivileged children was a step in the right direction," she says. And thus was born Literacy India. Today, the NGO takes up practically all of her non-flying hours.

And though she gets substantial help from her airline, colleagues and her staff of 34, including 14 full-time teachers, she is indubitably the captain.

Apart from garnering funds, fleshing out projects, steering the NGO's future course of action, she also gets celebrities to inspire kids. Recently, Bollywood director Vishal Bharadwaj (of Maqbool fame) was so impressed with some of the kids' histrionic abilities that he signed five of them on for his next commercial Hindi venture, Neeli Chhatri (an adaptation of Ruskin Bond's famous story The Blue Umbrella).

Last year, the NGO's 35 kids put up a splendid show before President Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam at the Rashtrapati Bhawan. Some have even performed at Delhi's Sri Ram Centre and National School of Drama, and a string of venues in Kolkata. Every Child Rights Day (November 20), the NGO organises a special treat for its children.

While last year it was a 55-minute joy ride for 129 kids in an A-320 flight from Delhi to Jaipur, this year the NGO put up a fund-raising charity cricket match — Media Vs Corporates — in Delhi.

The efforts met with tremendous response and blue-chip companies like Electrolux and Coca-Cola pitched in with monetary help. Clearly, with Indraani Singh in the pilot's seat, Literacy India and its children are flying high.

Women's Feature Service

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