Social Workers - Job Decodified

Social Workers are indeed a strange species, wandering around from place to place a la wandering minstrels spending their time with the deprived, deprivated and down trodden sections of society, going unwashed and underfed for days on end, taking up cudgels on behalf of any cause or then people who tickle their fancy and strike a chord deep down in their hearts.

A natural empathy, inherent ability to put up with hardships and making do with the most rudimentary means of life sustenance, capacity to fall asleep on either a continuation of newspapers, on the hard ground, or then anywhere under the surrealistic skies and the heart and souls of either a nomad or fakir are pre-requisites or then much desired qualities in any and every social worker.

Putting a definition to or then making an effort towards confining the life skills of a social worker would indeed be an exercise in futility one just has to look up to people like Medha Patkar, Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal, Bill Gates, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, Nafisa Ali, Amod Kanth or others of their ilk to understand what social work is all about.

My life is my karma or deeds or so Mahatma Gandhi once spoke, social workers is what social workers do, they take up cudgels on behalf of the downtrodden, deprived and marginalized sections of our so called society, raise their individual and collective voices against atrocities both real and perceived, galvanise public opinion against the misdeeds or sins of omission and commission of our so called rulers, organise protest marches and agitations against transgressions of women and child rights, barrack and lay siege to factories and establishments where the reprehensible practice of child labour is rampant.

Stick onto trees like a leech and even go down with them in a heroic effort to safeguard our environment, make Tinsel Town demigods(?) seek public pardons for having committed the sin of hunting down an animal belonging to an endangered species and last but not the least even take on the might of the government in a show of sheer bravado in order to ensure that an important anti corruption legislation or watchdog did not end up being a toothless tiger and irrelevant document gathering dust within the hallowed (?) precincts of the Lok Sabha (lower house of India’s parliament) library and also selflessly reach the battlefield during wars and skirmishes in order to render yeomans service and apply a salve on the wounds suffered by our indomitable warriors on both their bodies and psyches.

Please log onto the websites of the Greenpeace foundation, Amnesty International, Sparsh, Child rights and You (CRY), Helpage India, Concern India foundation, Make A Wish Foundation, Being Human or any other such site to gather crucial and humanising information on how you can and more significantly should make a difference.