Should one have expectations from friends? This is the subject of an animated group discussion among a bunch of teenagers, at the Doon Youth

Centre, located in the heart of Dehradun, off Rajpur Road. The discussion is being moderated by Ken McRae – a tall bright-eyed Canadian, who has made India his home since the last three decades. Incidentally, the centre – a place where youngsters can come, share their problems and try to arrive at solutions – is the latest among a series of projects that McRae has been involved in, since he came to India.

But, to begin his story from the beginning, McRae was a restaurant manager working in Toronto when he decided to take a break and travel the world. It was the 1970s – the time of the backpacking hippies – a young McRae soon joined their ranks and backpacked around the world for three years. In 1974, while he was in India, he had, as he puts it, a major life-changing moment. A missionary doctor – who was planning to go to inaccessible villages near Dehradun to provide medical aid to villagers – wanted volunteers. McRae joined him. As he started working with the doctor, he realized that there was great joy in doing something for other people. “All my life, I had been a self-centred person. I now found that there was greater satisfaction in giving,” he recollects.

Soon, McRae relocated to India and began working with orphans. For many years, he ran a school near Mussoorie for orphan village kids. In the late ’90s however, another incident happened that changed the direction of his work. The incident was the suicide of four youngsters – aged between 16 to 20 – all of whom belonged to upper middle class families and lived in an affluent locality in Dehradun. “These suicides made me realise the kind of apathy our society showed towards the problems faced by kids, irrespective of their socio-economic background,” says McRae. This incident also became an impetus for him to probe the problems that made youngsters take the extreme step of ending their lives and resulted in the formation of the Doon Youth Centre.

“The centre has been positioned not just as a counselling centre, but as a place where the youth can hang out,” says McRae. Accordingly, it has a variety of indoor games like table tennis, chess, carrom etc as well as a small library. “The objective is to create an informal and friendly atmosphere, where youngsters can work out problems through discussions with their peers as well as mentors,” says McRae.

Incidentally, all the services in the centre are free, with the rent for the premises as well as overheads being paid for by McRae and his family through the workshops that they conduct at various schools. McRae has an interesting explanation on why they have kept no charges at the centre. “The feedback that most kids gave us was that if services were not free, their parents wouldn’t allow them to come. Instead, they’ll ask them – why go to a centre to talk; why not talk to us?”

What most parents don’t realise, says Mc Rae, is that today’s youngsters grapple with a lot of issues -moral, psychological as well as academic. “The core problem in our society is that the value of a child is seen in accordance with the marks that he or she gets,” he says. “When a kid is not stressed about peer pressure or other growing up issues, academics fall into place. But all we do is expect results from them.”

Although McRae and his family have been keeping alive their work with youngsters with their own resources for many years now, they are beginning to feel a funds crunch. “I would like to open more youth centres where there are multiple activities since there is currently a huge shortage of places where kids can go. But right now, I find it difficult to even pay rent for this centre,” he says.

Perhaps it’s time our society realises the need to support the work of individuals like McRae. For, as the saying goes: ‘Only if we understand youth today, can we hope to empower them tomorrow’.

Original article can be found here

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