He left the military, came to the U.S., started his own company, and became financially successful. Growing up, I always saw how charitable he was, giving to others in need. I think the lessons he’d learned through his early travels in India informed his decisions, as well as a strong Gandhian sense of equality.
The suffering he’d seen in his motherland never left him, however, and in 1995 he returned to India, committed to using his wealth to help end poverty and injustice. He did some incredible things during those first years, including orchestrating the largest testing and treatment of lead poisoning ever conducted in the world. It paved the way for unleaded gasoline in India and had a massive impact on the environment and health of the nation.
Still, his most burning desire was to change the social and economic inequity of India. The idea that would become Shanti Bhavan had already taken hold in him—that if you could give impoverished children the same tools and opportunities their wealthier peers had, while modeling for them strong values and civic engagement, there would be no limit to what they could achieve.
Glamour: Can you explain the approach you use at Shanti Bhavan? How is it different from other interventions that fight poverty?
AG: The poverty our children experience is generational, passed on from parent to child for hundreds of years. It is also both social and financial—a potent and corrosive combination of discrimination and economic deprivation. And it is multifaceted. The children face rampant alcoholism in their families, physical and sexual abuse, forced early marriage, chronic illness, high suicide rates, generational debts, and other destructive elements that curtail upward mobility.
To break that cycle requires radical intervention.
Teaching a child to read or giving them access to primary or even secondary school education isn’t enough to allow them to compete with better-educated children for good jobs. To break out of poverty and join their middle- and upper-class peers, they need firm academic grounding beginning at the age of three or four; they need spaces where they can feel safe and loved, and where they can study without distraction; they need access to basic utilities like electricity and working bathrooms; they need nutritional meals and proper health care; and they need exposure to global attitudes and values to prepare them for the modern workplace. Then they need college placement, tuition support, and career counseling. Perhaps most important, they need mentorship, guidance, reinforcement of self-esteem, positive role-models, and aspirational goals that motivate them.
Behind the scenes on Daughters of Destiny.Devorah Palladino/Netflix
