Innocent children

From the start, Gandharv Telhan knew he had made the right choice. The smile that exploded across his face as he boarded his flight to India in August 2004 was proof of that.

Telhan (Cognitive Science ’04) was beginning a year in a small village in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, on a fellowship with Indicorps, a nonpartisan, nonreligious, non-profit organization that connects Americans, Britons and Canadians of Indian descent with public service projects in their ancestral homeland.

He worked with the economically and often emotionally impoverished children of sex workers, coordinating and conducting daily workshops to build their self-esteem, sometimes from the ground up. It was a project for which he specifically applied.

“After graduating from U.Va.,” Telhan says, “there was so much knowledge that was just sitting in my brain, but this gave me an opportunity to take it and apply it and put it to work and make it come to life. To stop just preparing to do something and actually do something.”

Overwhelmed by poverty and degradation from an early age, these children develop a fatalism that they will become “victims of commercial sexual exploitation” like their mothers, Telhan says. One girl he worked with was named for an infamous prostitute to reinforce the notion that she was destined to live that life.

With parental consent, a local nongovernmental organization called HELP brought the children, who range in age from 4 to 18, to a youth hostel in the village of Machavaram, two and a half hours away from their mothers.

They attended public schools and spent an hour each afternoon in Telhan’s workshops, where they learned — many for the first time — about concepts such as integrity, self-respect and confidence. Left in the abstract, these ideas might not sink in.

“They’d rather watch a movie,” Telhan says. “But [it works] if I can show them that this will have value for them in their relationships with other people.” He encouraged the teenagers to use writing as a tool for emotional release and conducted group discussions with the younger children where the goal is to provide “a chance for a catharsis and … a sense of belonging in a place where other people have shared other experiences similar to that.”

To introduce the concept of self-assertiveness, Telhan had teenagers come to the front of the room and, in a confident manner, assert their right to exist. Children learned about self-acceptance by concentrating on their faces in a mirror, embracing themselves and their bodies no matter what past abuses they might have suffered.

All the while, Telhan kept extensive records of his work, both to keep his fellowship supervisors informed and to give the local teachers something to work with after he returned home. “The key is to make it sustainable,” he says.

For several reasons, Telhan calls his year in India “the best choice I’ve ever made.” Born in New Delhi but raised in Reston, Va., since infancy, he welcomed the opportunity to connect with his heritage.

“It allowed me to take more ownership of my identity, both as an Indian and as an American. It’s more of an active choice of embracing both of them, rather than simply being Indian-American because that’s what your title is.”

He says he was overjoyed to immerse himself in a project that focused on mental health, an area he grew passionate about as an undergrad studying cognitive science (with a concentration in neuroscience).

“What I want to do with my life,” Telhan says, “is to help other people realize their own strengths — doing that through psychology by helping them realize who they really are, versus these false perceptions that we take on. To help them awaken to their true power, to their true potential, and then help them pursue that. To do that this year, for me, has been amazing.

“And I feel that it’s also awakened me to the potential within me, you know, because I realized that change is not that hard. It’s not so hard to make a difference, if you’re willing to try and if you’re willing to put your heart into it. You just have to invest the time and the energy to find the solution.”