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Street Beggar to Star Striker, Raja is India’s Football Hope

Rounding the last defender, Raja Chinnaswamy looks up towards the iron frame of the goal in the lee of the white-washed wall of the orphanage behind. He pulls back his right foot and lets fly, sending the ball hurtling past the goalkeeper and out through the gaping hole in the torn netting.

Eight years ago, when he first arrived at the orphanage in the southern Indian state of Kerala, Raja had never seen a football. Today he is a rising star of Indian football, a 14-year-old already being talked about by his excited coaches as a future fixture in the national team.

Indian football’s moment may be coming. Last year the country qualified for the finals of the Asian Cup for the first time since 1984. English Premiership clubs have also woken up to the fact that the subcontinent might have something to offer the world of football. Clubs such as Manchester United and Chelsea are moving into India, hoping to unearth the same wealth of talent that Africa has offered up, and to cash in on a vast untapped market of one billion people.

Yet the Indian national football team still languishes at 143 in the Fifa rankings, below the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, the Cape Verde Islands and Swaziland. Indian football desperately needs a hero, its own David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo. In Raja, it may finally have found one.

In a country which remains obsessed with cricket, the fact that a teenage boy wants to play football might be considered unusual enough. But the story of Raja is so extraordinary that it would not be out of place in a Bollywood movie.Born in Tamil Nadu in 1994, he was four when his mother was poisoned by her family for marrying below her caste. A couple of years later his father fell ill and lost his job at a sugar cane factory.

Hoping their luck would change, the boy and his father headed for the town of Thrissur in Kerala, but quickly found themselves penniless and on the streets. With his father too ill to work, Raja turned to begging. “I never thought about it,” he said. “It was the only thing to do. Sometimes people would give me money and sometimes they would slap me.” If he was lucky, he would make 100 rupees a day, but Raja was anything but lucky. Some of the other street children spotted him begging at the station. They told the gullible six-year-old they could get him a job and one for his father. Instead they took him to meet the boss of the local begging mafia, a man also called Chinnaswamy, behind a row of shops. The man threatened him and warned him against trying to escape.

“He said I had to give him 100 rupees a day or he would kill my father,” Raja said. If he tried to escape, he was told, the other children would inform on him. One day Raja failed to hit his target. His father was sick with a fever and the boy needed to care for him.

“In the evening I went begging and went to see Chinnaswamy to give him the 50 rupees I had made. He tied me to a stove and hit me with an iron rod,” he said. Chinnaswamy had gathered the other children round to watch, to make sure that they learned the lesson. The rod was heated on the stove until it was red hot. Raja rolls down his sock to show the scars. There is another scar to the left of one eye from where he was burned with a cigarette.

If anyone needed a break, it was Raja. Finally he got one. A friendly bookseller found him sobbing in the street and took pity on him. He knew of an orphanage where the boy would be safe. It was Raja’s good fortune that the Janaseva Boys’ Home in Madhurappuram was run by a former international athlete, Jose Maveli, whose passion for sport had not diminished at the same rate as his physical abilities.

Maveli offered the 100 or so boys who lived there a chance of an education, but, more importantly for Raja, sports training. It was not long before his natural footballing talents were spotted by a couple of former Indian footballing internationals roped in by Maveli to lend a hand with the coaching.

“He is a very speedy player with the ball and a very good goal-getter,” said Soly Xavier, who played right back for the national side from 1986 to 1989. “He thinks about positioning and is always watching the other players. Whenever he gets an opportunity, he scores a goal. Within a year and a half he will be in the national side.”

Last September, Raja was selected for the state football team: “I was happy and crying. Many of the players were crying because they had not been selected, but I was crying because I had.”

Now trials for the Indian national side are beckoning. Neither Raja nor his coaches doubt that he will make it. “I will definitely play for India. I can do it,” he says. And he trots off towards the center circle of the red dirt pitch carved out of a scrap of land surrounded by palm trees in one of the most beautiful parts of a country that does not yet care about football – but may soon have something to cheer about.

Tags: Beggar, Football, Hope, India's, Raja, Star, STREET, Striker

India’s E-tutors Give Uk Children Homework Help

When Kelsey Baird began worrying about the complexity of AS-level biology she got a tutor from India. It is more than 4,000 miles from her boarding school in Fife to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, but a new e-tutoring system makes the distance irrelevant.

Across India, hundreds of teachers have been recruited to feed a growing demand for online tutors. With maths and science teaching in Britain and the US in crisis, new Indian education companies are rushing to fill the gaps.

Working late into the night to bridge the time difference – India is four and a half hours ahead of the UK – the e-tutors give individual help. Some work in mini-call centres, fielding appeals for help from children struggling with trigonometry homework. Others sit by computers at home, soothingly guiding pupils on the other side of the world through the technicalities of algebra.

A handful of entrepreneurs has spotted the lucrative possibilities of converting this expertise into services to the West. Online education is providing a wave of new business.

Krishnan Ganesh sold his call centre company to set up Tutorvista, which launched cheap online tuition services in the UK last month.

‘Education is a major preoccupation [in Britain]. There isn’t the money to pay for enough teachers in schools and it’s almost impossible for children to get personalised attention,’ he said. ‘Tony Blair might be able to afford private tuition for his children, but most people can’t.’

His company offers students unlimited help for £50 a month. ‘If they want to get into Oxford, get a place at a private school, catch up when they’re behind, or just improve their marks, what they need is individual help,’ Ganesh said.

Classes are conducted via a whiteboard that allows tutor and pupil to watch each other draw symbols and go through equations together on the net, using a mouse instead of chalk. ‘You form a rapport with the whole family. Quite often the parents will be sitting by the computer trying to learn elementary algebra alongside their children,’ said Anirudh Phadke, general manager of e-tutoring at Career Launcher, a company offering tuition for the US curriculum.

India’s educational standards vary hugely but there is some fine teaching of maths and science, with a traditional and rigorous approach. ‘The real advantage is that Indian teachers are cheaper,’ said Shantanu Prakash, managing director of Educomp, which teaches internet maths to American pupils.

India’s new online teachers have not been impressed by the standards achieved by British children. ‘They are not really academically fully skilled,’ said Rita Sampson, a former college principal, now teaching English language online from her Bangalore home. ‘There seems to have been a deterioration in standards. Retention in Indian students is much better.’

Like their call-centre colleagues, the teachers go through intensive training to neutralise the way they speak English and have lessons in British culture.

‘Most of the students don’t even know that they are being taught by someone in India. We don’t give ourselves Western names, although we are trained in US accents. Quite often when we tell students in the US that we are from India, they think we mean Indiana. Their geography is not strong,’ Phadke said.

A glossary of UK slang has been compiled to help tutors navigate the peculiarities of teenage vernacular – explaining expressions such as ‘bunking off’, ‘dodgy’ and (perhaps less helpfully) ‘blimey’.

The Indian co-founders of heymaths.com/net have developed a comprehensive online tuition system designed to make learning maths more enjoyable and offer help to schools.

‘Maths teachers are retiring and not enough good teachers are coming into the system,’ Nirmala Sankaran, Heymaths co-founder, said. ‘This is increasingly a global problem. But Ganesh stresses that this is not an issue of removing jobs from the West.

‘We are trying to make UK students more academically qualified, do better, graduate better, so that their jobs are not taken away from them and outsourced to India,’ he said.

For Kelsey Baird, this is not just a way of paying someone else to do her homework. ‘It’s about having extra help with understanding things. I knew I would find it hard in my final year. It was kind of weird to begin with, looking at the screen and talking into the computer, but actually it’s been pretty good.’

Tags: Children, Etutors, give, Help, Homework, India's

Microsoft Dollars to Help India’s Aids Victims

On a terrace above the grimy, narrow lanes of Calcutta’s Sonagachi red-light district stands a shapely figure wrapped in hip-hugging jeans and a floaty brown and cream chiffon top. Raising his plucked eyebrows and pointing painted fingernails to emphasise his words, Sunil Das is explaining to Melinda Gates, the world’s wealthiest woman the difficulties of being a male prostitute in modern-day India.

“We are considered abnormal by society and the stigma is much greater. There are 5,000 of us in Calcutta and we are much more vulnerable to diseases such as Aids than other sex workers. We need condoms, lubricants and jelly.”

Mrs Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill, is in India to raise awareness of Aids in a country where sex is not a topic for polite conversation.

Visiting the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a charity supported by the Gates Foundation, which attempts to lift the taboo about prostitution, Mrs Gates nods her head, smeared in yellow paste, as she hears complaints of police harassment and how difficult it is to raise and educate children on a sex worker’s wage.

The DMSC is a model of good practice. Within two years of it being set up, condom use in red-light areas went from zero to 70%. And HIV infection rates among prostitutes fell to just 5% of the population. It also runs schools for the children of sex workers and even has its own bank.

Mrs Gates would like such successes replicated across India, where six out of seven HIV cases are caused by unsafe sex. The country already has 5 million HIV-positive people – the second only to South Africa in terms of numbers. Aids has spread beyond the most vulnerable groups and entered society’s mainstream, and if current trends continue India could have 25m cases by the end of the decade.

“It all hangs in the balance with India,” said Mrs Gates, in an interview with the Guardian yesterday. “We could defeat it or we have 15, 20, 25 million people infected here. That is why Bill and I have committed $200m (£110m) to India, more money than we have given to any other country in the world.”

The Gateses, estimated to be worth $70bn, say they are going to give it all away to deserving causes before they die. In the next few weeks, the Gates Foundation, the world’s biggest philanthropic venture, will release the second tranche of its cash, about $70m, to four Indian states where Aids is described as a “bomb waiting to explode”.

Discrimination against Aids victims and their surviving families is ingrained across India. Earlier this month in West Bengal a village faced a boycott from neighbouring districts when it emerged that a local man had died of Aids. Last week the high court in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) forced an insurance company to reverse its decision to refuse to employ a woman because she was HIV positive.

Mrs Gates, who recently visited three African countries with her husband, says the situation in India and Africa is comparable, with one crucial difference. “Absolutely there is the problem of people being stigmatised in Africa. But there is something different in India. Here there is a lot of hope among the people. You can see it when people move to the cities here for economic hope. In many villages in Africa there is not the same kind of hope.”

Despite this, India has been slow to respond to the gathering storm. Worse still, some prominent politicians, notably India’s Hindu nationalist deputy prime minister, have criticised the emphasis on promoting condoms, saying they encourage promiscuity.

The government’s lack of progress in tackling the nascent epidemic brought it much criticism. India has just 25 testing machines that monitor a patient’s HIV status, and few doctors in health centres are devoted to the specialism.

Although its pharmaceutical industries produce the cheapest Aids drugs in the world, a paltry amount of government spending – just 6p per sexually active person – has been set aside for treating the disease.

“It is the most serious health problem facing India,” wrote the former finance minister P Chidambaram last month. “The prime minister should make fighting HIV/Aids his pet project.”

The attacks have spurred the government into action and there are now plans to provide cheap drugs for 100,000 people.

Mrs Gates acknowledges that to make a real difference those in the public eye will have to start talking about sex. “It worked in Uganda where officials and government ministers spoke out about Aids and condoms. In India it will need ministers, actors, cricket stars and industrialists to discuss it openly. That is what it took in the US to change attitudes.”

Tags: Aids, Dollars, Help, India's, Microsoft, Victims