The Open Society Institute, which is part of George Soros’ Foundation, announced its 2004 Fellowship winners last week:

Community Fellowships are awarded to individuals who wish to employ their educational and professional attainments in service to disadvantaged communities. The goals are to encourage public and community service careers, expand the number of mentors and role models available to youth in inner-city neighborhoods, and promote initiatives and entrepreneurship that will empower those communities to increase opportunity and improve the quality of life there.

Specifically, there were community leaders were picked from NYC:

Ten New York City community organizers, activists and leaders working to improve the quality of public life in low-income neighborhoods were awarded Open Society Institute New York City Community Fellowships.

The NYC Community Fellows are working on a range of innovative public interest projects, including the creation of a community-based legal center to aid South Asian immigrants, the establishment of a domestic violence center for refugee and immigrant African women, and a program in Harlem to protect fixed-income seniors facing eviction.

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The Christian Science Monitor takes an inspiring look at the state of literacy in Kerala. Why are our Mallu friends so damn into their books and education?

At the Janaranjini preschool in the state of Kerala in rural southern India, children aren’t building castles in the sand. Instead, as they sit cross-legged in front of a thin layer of sand, they are learning the fundamentals of reading and math.

Three-year old V. S. Madhav twirls letters of his native Malayalam – the language of Kerala – into the sand with his left forefinger while his classmate, 4-year old Neethu Saji, writes Arabic numerals more quickly than her teacher can call them out.

“I also learned like this. My father also like this,” says N. Revindhran. Mr. Revindhran is a volunteer at the public library that runs this preschool, locally referred to as a kalari. “This is the ancient model [of schooling],” Revindhran explains.

Education in Kerala represents a success story that many nations might wish to emulate.

I had always learned that the high literacy rate in Kerala was directly related to the emphasis that Christian missionaries there had placed on reading. The messages of the Bible are best spread by reading of course. This article cured me of some of my misconceptions.

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Months ago I posted a little history lesson about the Cult of Thugee in India, from which the overused term “Thug” originated. Today Slate.com, in its dispatches, features a look at a modern day Indian thug cult of sorts, which is known as Hanuman the Monkey God’s Army.

One hundred years ago, Dharavi, which is now Asia’s largest slum, was a fishing village at the edge of Mumbai. As the growing city dumped its junk here, the salt plain turned to swampy landfill. Then, from the 1950s, as rural Indians arrived in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was then known, looking for work, they came to Dharavi. Now the teeming slum, which used to be the most marginal of all marginal communities, is right smack in the middle of Greater Mumbai.

Babalu is a clean-cut 27-year-old with a freckle embedded in the white of his right eye who works on the street hawking barrettes. He is also the head of the Lord Ram Unit of the Bajrang Dal, the paramilitary youth wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the religious wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The RSS is a Hindu nationalist organization that has supported a host of unsavory bigots from Adolf Hitler to Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi in 1948. Although the RSS claimed Godse was not a member of the organization at the time of the assassination, this was an attempt to distance the RSS from the scandal.

“As a member of BD, I’m a notorious troublemaker,” Babalu said as he sat at a back table in Venus, a vegetarian restaurant in the slum. The Bajrang Dal, otherwise known as Hanuman the Monkey God’s Army, is extremely violent. They claim to have 1.3 million members throughout India. I’d met Babalu through a lanky community leader who as a teenager had also been a member of the Bajrang Dal. The lanky man had left the organization years earlier because he was disgusted by their violence.

Reading through Slate’s dispatch I couldnÂ’t help but see similarities between this “Army of the Monkey God” and the notorious American prison gang Nuestra Familia.
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