The day Farukh reached the village he was to spend the next 6 months, there were three separate incidents of Naxal violence in the area. “I was going to a new place, so I didn’t know anything. I had seen a village before but I had never lived in one for such a long period of time. I heard there were Naxals in Jharkhand, so I had concerns”, Farukh recounts his apprehensions.
 
While pursuing his Masters in Social Work, Farukh was selected to go to Manthan Yuva Sansthan in Jharkhand, as part of theYouth For Development programme. Here he took an active part in the organisation’s community programme.
 
Farukh spent the next four months in Kisko block in the Lohardaga district of Jharkhand and the last two months in the head office. Why did he choose Manthan Yuva Sansthan in the first place?
 
“I wanted to do something different and the community radio project sounded interesting. I wanted to learn some technical skills as well”, explains Farukh
 
He describes his experience of working in the organisation as,” Brilliant”, saying that his mentor and district coordinator gave him complete freedom to work as he wanted. “I could carry out whatever projects I wished.”
 
One of the first tasks that he was given was fine-tuning the office structure. “There was a team of 10-15 reporters, some of them were lax. The field coordinator and I also tried to streamline the management of the office”, he explains.
 
This process would eventually lead to conflicts and heartburn for some of those involved. “They saw me as an outsider, a rank newcomer who was experimenting with their way of functioning. This was a problem. Some of them told me that I really didn’t know how to work,” Farukh recounts the difficult times.
 
Though the problems could have blown up in to huge proportions, Farukh’s quick thinking made him realise his mistakes. “I was looking at this task as just a project but in fact I should have seen it as a relationship builder. So we talked about their apprehensions, I apologised sometimes. Over time our differences melted away” he says with some amount of relief.
 
It was the community radio project that gave Farukh the most satisfaction, “We used to go into a community, consult them about different issues and then we would convert them into a script.” Though he had never previously come across scripts, his task was to cross check them, a task he got better at over time. “In the last two months I acquired some technical skills as well: I learnt to edit and record radio programmes which were going to be broadcast on Akashvani,” says Farukh. 
 
He slowly recounts his learnings of spending six months in the community in Jharkhand. He agrees that sometimes he had come out from his introvert, reticent personality. “I was a shy person, it used to be difficult for me to open up and talk to people, but in the community I had to sometimes initiate conversations with people who didn’t even speak my language,” Farukh smiles.
 
“Sometimes in a community there are people who dismiss you. Sometimes they are not interested in what you have to say. I learnt that if you are persistent, then over time they will listen to you. I learnt persistence”, Farukh states with a sense of accomplishment.
 
Although the six months were not easy and Farukh faced the problems of cuisine, food, language barriers and a lack of safety provisions, his persistence paid off. He survived as he himself describes.
 
“I met a group of people once who I was later told were ‘Naxals’. I realised that we were not that different. They wore the same clothes, spoke in a similar fashion. I wasn’t afraid, maybe it would have been different if I had known who I was going to meet,” says this young man from Indore.
 
Change is something Farukh says has been constant throughout his six month experience. ‘I have changed, I’m now satisfied with the things I have. I don’t run after things anymore.”
 

His suggestions for the YFD programme. “It is a good programme. There should be more youth involved in this sort of programme. I want more friends of mine to get involved in YFD and the development sector”, says Farukh who now wants to put his experience of the 6 months in Manthan to good use and share with other young people.  

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