When Caring Became a Craft
The pandemic did strange things to time. It also did unexpected things to friendships.
In 2020, a group of us — batchmates from Thadomal Shahani Engineering College — started getting together regularly, the way you do when the world goes quiet and you suddenly need to know if the people you care about are alright. We were checking in. That was all it was, at first.
Then on a call on April 25, 2021, something shifted. Karon — a friend, a leader, someone I'd describe as one of the highest-bandwidth people I know — broke down. She was being flooded with messages asking for help, and one of her own employees had reached out at the 11th hour for medicine money. Remdesivir. Karon couldn't get it in time. The employee didn't make it.
That brought the pandemic home to me in a way the news never had.
That evening, sitting with Appa and Amma for our daily prayer, with the mind finally quiet, something small and clear emerged. Rohini and I decided: we would find people doing the work on the ground, and we would support them. The next day I posted a fundraiser appeal. The response was humbling — together, close to $200,000 was raised.
But money moving was only the beginning of what that season taught me.
Through MahaPECOnet and our partnership with Ratna Nidhi in Mumbai, I got to see what ground-level coordination actually looked like — 1,376 oxygen concentrators procured and delivered to rural hospitals, a verification process built around accountability, plans for an oxygen bank to serve the urban poor at five rupees. I met trustees Rajiv Mehta and Arvind Shah, and was struck by the years of quiet experience in how they moved. No drama. Just systems, trust, and relentless adaptability.
Out of that season, TSEC Alumni Philanthropy — TAP — took formal shape. A nonprofit, founded by batchmates, built around the belief that giving could be more than a transaction. That pooling resources could reach further. That rigorous due diligence could find the organisations that deserved to be found.
That last part turned out to matter more than I expected.
Due diligence is humbling work. You start asking questions — how does an organisation function, how are decisions made on the ground, how does help actually travel from donor to the person who needs it — and you quickly discover how much you don't know. Not about the organisation. About the work itself. About what it takes to keep something running at the grassroots, day after day.
Girish had told me in 2019 that to really understand, I needed to be immersed. TAP, in its own way, was now telling me the same thing. Funding work from a distance, however thoughtfully, kept raising questions that only proximity could answer.
The seed of 2017. The form of 2019. And now, in 2021, a reason grounded in something more than feeling — a recognition that to give well, I first needed to understand deeply. The internship idea was no longer just about being near Appa. It had become something the work itself was asking of me.
