Video: "Revolutionary Optimist"
"Map Your World - TEDxChange Video"
Amlan Ganguly and
Prayasam
About the filmmakers:
Nicole Newnham is a documentary filmmaker and writer, currently co-producing The Revolutionary Optimists with Maren Grainger-Monsen as a filmmaker-in-residence at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics Program in Bioethics and Film.
About the Film:
Children are saving lives in the slums of Kolkata. Amlan Ganguly doesn't rescue slum children; he empowers them to become change agents, battling poverty and transforming their neighborhoods with dramatic results.
Filmed over the course of several years, The Revolutionary Optimists follows Amlan and three of the children he works with on an intimate journey through adolescence, as they fight for the better future he encourages them to imagine is deservedly theirs.
Kajal, a twelve-year-old girl, is one of 9 million Indian children who live and work inside a brick field.
When Amlan creates the first school inside the brick field, Kajal has a chance to have an education, and find her voice. But when her mother falls ill, she and Amlan must balance her desire to learn and make change with her need to work in order to survive.
Priyanka is the sixteen-year-old leader of a dance troupe founded by Amlan to keep girls in school and dissuade them from early marriage. A serious dancer, she is also paid a tiny stipend by Amlan to teach dance to other children in her neighborhood. Now her parents are pressuring her to marry against her wishes, and she sees only one way out – to marry her young boyfriend. But if she elopes, she will be controlled by her in-laws, and risks losing her position in the dance group, her employment, and her chance at an education.
Salim is an eleven-year-old boy who is fighting to make change in one of Kolkata’s worst slums, but his family faces many hardships—including having to leave their home at 4:30 every morning to steal water from a neighboring slum, as there is no water in their colony.
By mapping their un-mapped community and collecting data about the problems that they face, Salim and his fellow child activists hope to convince the government to give them a water tap. Can these child activists bring about desperately needed change in their own community?
Hot-headed, theatrical, but astonishingly dedicated and sincere, Amlan left a successful law career to try to make meaningful change where the law and other NGO's had failed. A dancer, choreographer, and costume designer, he brings creative expression to subjects that can otherwise be difficult for film audiences to approach.
The Revolutionary Optimists will leverage this artistry, to reveal to the audience both the desperate, flawed world he is trying to change, and the vibrant, colorful world that his optimism generates. As the centerpiece of a multi-platform advocacy campaign, The Revolutionary Optimists will leverage Ganguly’s story to bring attention to the urgent need to solve the treatable health problems in the developing world, and how education and child empowerment are a crucial key to reaching that goal.
Through our online tool,
Map Your World, we hope to give these youth a powerful technological tool to advance their dreams of change for the neighborhood and inspire other kids around the world to make their worlds a better place.
A qualified lawyer, Amlan began his career as an apprentice to the most reputed criminal lawyer in Calcutta. He was soon disillusioned with a legal system that provided little justice to the poor unable to pay fees and withstand the long drawn legal process.
In 1996, Amlan decided to make a complete switch and joined Lutheran World Service India.
In 1999, Amlan registered
Prayasam with a few friends with the intention of enabling children to participate in the decisions and factors that affect their lives. Under Amlan’s leadership, Prayasam has emerged as a regional expert and trailblazer in child rights programming and workshops. Amlan is best known for his use of popular media to engage and educate children in an interactive, problem-posing approach. A self-taught choreographer and fashion designer, Amlan incorporates both contemporary and traditional art forms into Prayasam’s alternative education models, which range from song, dance and comics to puppetry and storytelling.
The Board of Directors of Prayasam is composed mostly of children
Amlan has made mentorship a hallmark at
Prayasam, which has become a platform for introducing young people of diverse backgrounds to the social sector. Amlan is best known for his use of popular media to engage and educate children in an interactive, problem-posing approach.
Amlan’s ideas about education have been recognized worldwide as both timely and important.
In 2006, he became an
Ashoka Fellow, part of an association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs.
In July 2007, Amlan was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation to attend the
Global Urban Summit on Innovations for an Urban World in Bellagio, Italy.
In 2011 Amlan was awarded the Ford Fellowship by the Ford Motor Company Fund and the Picker Center for Executive Education at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Prayasam continues to introduce its peer education and child empowerment concepts to impoverished sectors of society. Notably,
Prayasam is working with the West Bengal government to uplift brick kiln migrant worker communities – the first such collaboration between government and NGO in India – through its signature “Multiple Activity Centres.”
In addition to his work in West Bengal, Amlan facilitates leadership, soft skills and gender trainings across India, most recently with World Vision India in all over West Bengal and under the aegis of the Xavier Institute of Social Sciences in Bangalore, India.
