Hungry to help

BENGALURU: Meet Mohd Rayyan, Mohd Altamash, Mannal Kaleem, Mahmood MJ and Noor Zahira – five students from Bengaluru who have been out and about with on-ground activities since the beginning of March. Now, as part of their COVID-19 relief initiative, the youngsters have taken it upon themselves to distribute 300 Ramzan kits to families from vulnerable groups like daily wage workers, migrant labourers and slum dwellers. “We wanted to help those families who didn’t have enough to even begin their first fast during this holy time. Our kits can now last them for a month,” says Zahira, who along with her four friends are the faces behind Students of Bengaluru. 

The team began distributing these kits on Saturday. So far, they have given out the ration to 130 families and will continue to do so for the next few days. Each kit is meant to last a month and contains rice (7 kg), atta (10 kg), sugar (3 kg), salt (1 kg), oil (1 litre) and dal (1 kg), along with other staples like ginger garlic paste, onions, tea powder, etc.

“In order to make it more festive, we also added almonds, raisins, cashew nuts, dates, seviyan and Tang powder,” says Mahmood. This is not the first round of ration kits the team is distributing, having already given out essentials to almost 1,000 families in different parts of the city like Austin Town, Tannery Road, Halasuru, Indiranagar, Shivajinagar, RT Nagar, etc. Previously, they have also distributed 200 PPE kits to doctors at different government hospitals , 5,000 hydration kits to destitutes and cops, 1,000 face shields to security guards, nurses, janitors at hospitals and fever clinics, and 5,000 masks to citizens. 

Besides help from activists like the Sahara Collective (who helped them raise funds on Twitter), the youngsters also collected `80-85,000 from personal savings, all by sacrificing money collected for various things like a two-wheeler, mobile phone and a holiday. “Our families also helped us by giving us the money they would have kept aside for zakat,” says Zahira, explaining how this sum is usually used to help the poor during Ramzan. 

The group of five, aged between 18 and 23 years and students of various colleges, incidentally, met at an anti-CAA protest in the city and have stuck together since then. Each member now has a designated role. Mahmood, a physiotherapy student, looks after the health and hygiene of the team and those they come in contact with; Altamash – a travel enthusiast – takes care of mobilisation of resources; national-level boxer Rayyan helps with packing and shifting resources; psychology student Kaleem lends a helpful ear and offers words of advice when the going gets tough; and Zahira looks after PR and fund raising. 

Recalling the “emotional trauma” of the circumstances they witnessed – labourers scrounging for scraps of food in waste land, pregnant women continuing regular routine work without adequate nutrition, ceilings with leaks - the youngsters got a first-hand experience of the privilege they are blessed with. “The best thing we can do right now is to consolidate and do everything we can to help out,” says Mahmood.