Desperate NGOs seek celeb push

KOLKATA: Roll over yoga and ayurvedic rubdowns. The all new quick-fix philanthropic message is here.
And Kolkata seems to have become the mecca of this feel good exercise for the soul.
The criterion to enter this massage club is simple. You need to be an international celeb, preferably White, have the ability to raise indecent amounts of moolah by lending your name alone and make hush-hush visits to the city which are selectively leaked the media to ensure maximum ruckus and therefore, attention.
But then why Kolkata? Filmmaker-novelist Jayabrato Chatterjee calls it "a bad Mother Teresa hangover".Even Bill Clinton made it a point to visit Sishu Bhavan of the Missionaries of Charity when he was here last year.
According to Chatterjee, "It was picture book disaster. A foreign tourist would be as disappointed if he went to Kashmir and didn’t see the mountains as he would if he came to Kolkata and missed seeing child sleeping on the footpath."
Check out the mission statement of Sabera Foundation, an NGO primarily funded from Hollywood and Spain. "Streets are teeming with children abandoned by their parents, forced into begging and prostitution... (a city) where an estimated 50,000 female foetuses are killed every year following tests."
Former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash says on the GOAL website after his vist last November in ''a message of hope from the city of misery.'' "I was shocked to see very young children fighting with each other and vying with the rats for filthy scraps of food and anything that could possibly be sold." Bingo!
Indian NGOs are no less responsible than the Indian media for keeping up the image of a poverty stricken city where nothing works. An English weekly, while enumerating the Metro as one of the 55 things that India is proud of, describes Kolkata as "laidback and fithy... urban cleanliness is at best a theoretical concept."
NGOs vie with each other for celeb visits because that ensures media attention and helps with further funding. Udayan, the home for children of leprosy sufferers, started in 1970, but came into focus only after Australian cricketer Steve Waugh became involved about four years ago. Now there are reports of differences within the top brass of Udayan over certain issues.
NGOs clearly are in a desperate need for a celeb push. So desperate is the situation that an NGO founder made a frantic call on the last day of the India-West Indies Test to say that he had "managed to get a cricketer to come and visit the children’s home!" And who is it, we queried "I don’t know yet. It will be someone." He called the next morning, crestfallen, to say he had not managed. Someone else got there before him.
However NGOs are not all about exploiting poverty. Sheriff Sunil Gangopadhyaya feels that NGOs at least "bring the children home". But the mission statements and the continuous exaggerated tom tomming of filth and grime has dwarfed a lot of Kolkata’s beauty.