Giving when it matters

Through her NGO, Healing Lives, corporate professional Jani Viswanath has changed the lives of blind football players, villagers in Bundelkhand as well as medical students in Kenya

Pics: Jani Viswanath; photo by Arun Angela. With the Indian football team 

By Shevlin Sebastian 

The rain was pelting down, looking like little icicles, as it hit the floodlit football pitch of the Jogo ground in Kochi. But in the enclosed parking area, a group of footballers, of the Blind Football Academy, stood around, as a petite woman, clad in a maroon T-shirt and white slacks, bent low, towards a stool, and cut a chocolate cake inscribed with the words, ‘Best Wishes to Team India’.

The boys sang ‘Happy Birthday to you’. Soon, Indian team coach Sunil Mathew and MC Roy, head of projects at the Society for Rehabilitation of the Visually Challenged made Jani bite into a piece of cake. 

The Dubai-based Jani had come to Kochi to encourage the players a few days before they jetted off to Thailand to take part in the IBSA Asian Championships held at Pattaya, Thailand in early October. Jani, a co-founder of the Healing Lives Foundation is a major sponsor. And she had come to inspire the team.  

However, when they lost their first two matches, against the higher-ranked China and Thailand, Jani called them and said, “Look, boys, this is your first international tournament. I don’t care if you win or lose. But I do care that you lose in a way that makes us all proud.” 

It had the desired effect. The next day, the Indian team beat the higher-ranked Malaysia team and ended up in fifth place overall. 

It was serendipity that brought Jani to support blind football. One day, while chatting with some of her Mumbai-based friends, they informed her that a national award-winning filmmaker from Assam, Bidyut Kotoky had run out of funds while making a film, ‘Xoixobote Dhemalite’ (Rainbow Fields).

So Jani stepped in as producer. While doing so, she came in contact with noted thespian Victor Banerjee who was acting in the film. Victor told Jani that he ran the Moran residential blind school at Moranhat, in Dibrugarh, Assam. “I was very intrigued and told him that I would like to see it,” she says. 

When Jani finally saw it, she was very impressed. “It was a beautiful and well-maintained school,” she says. “It was there that I saw blind football for the first time.” 

Jani also attended the North-East Blind football tournament in Shillong in January this year. “From then on I have been backing every tournament that the blind players have been playing,” says Jani She also ending up supporting Victor’s school and is a member of the board of trustees. 

The funds for the NGO comes from her family. Her husband Jonathan Jagtiani is the founder of Home Center, a part of the Landmark Group, which is one of the largest retail groups in West Asia. 

And after 18 years as a corporate professional, Jani also wanted to do something more. “Money gives you the luxury of choice, but it is not everything,” she says. “Giving back to the community was something that was taught to me by my late father, Dr T. K. Viswanath [an educationist and a former diplomat].” 

Thanks to her father’s posting, Jani grew up in Kabul. She studied in an Italian school called Michaelangelo where they had to attend Sunday mass and learn the Bible. “I also enjoyed the culture of my Muslim friends,” she says. “At home, I was reciting the Gayatri Mantra. I was lucky to have the influence of three religions simultaneously. It changed my perspective. Today, my religion is humanity. I don’t care what colour, language, religion or physical shape a person is, as long as I can help in some way.”  

So the NGO helps medical students in Kenya. These are brilliant kids who have got admission to the first year but do not have the resources to continue. So Healing Lives pays the tuition fees for the remainder of their medical degree. They also conduct free medical camps in villages and slums twice a year. In India, they have also adopted five villages at Bundelkhand.

“They used to suffer from drought every year,” says Jani. “We built dams, ponds and wells so that they became self-sufficient. We supply sweet water for drinking every day to each village, provide free seeds from our seed bank and give farmer's training on smart irrigation.” 

And these interactions have been an enriching experience for Jani. “It is easy to send money to an NGO and assuage my conscience,” she says. “But I prefer to go there physically and see what is happening. These are the discarded places on the planet. The poor have a purer heart than the rich. When you have lots of money, you have so many distractions. It dilutes your personality. So you are not able to retain that purity and simplicity that you are born with. But through my charitable work, I have found myself.”