My daughter and son in law volunteer for Asha For Education .

As we drove back from Chennai to Bangalore, she wanted to visit the Mahatma Gandhi School run by SEED .

We crawled through all the by-lanes of Sriperumbudur town looking for the school and went past this beautiful “chapparam” being renovated for a small local temple:

We also passed this lovely old temple "tank" or pond: We looked at this intriguingly "bottle"-shaped water tank on one of the houses: After all that traversing of the bylanes of the town, we were informed that the Mahatma Gandhi school was on the main highway! So we went back to the main road, and finally found the SEED project area building. The building was painted with an informative sign: There are three different activities going on: The Mahatma Gandhi Primary residential school , for both boys and girls up to Class V, the Mahatma Gandhi High residential School for boys, up to the 10th standard (or class or grade), and, at a different location in Irungkattukottai, and an ITI vocational training school for both young men and women. (Click on the name of the school for details.) The school is run for the children of life-imprisonment convicts and lepers, and for those whose parents are too aged or ill or economically unable to take care of them. Here are some of the children playing around the school buildings, as it was a Sunday: The chalk-written board on the wall of the office gave the numbers of the children there: Hema, the young woman who is the warden there, met us and talked to us: She mentioned that the Mahatma Gandhi School did not lack for funds, as "when people come to visit and we are a pleasant, efficient state of running, they look at the cute kids and their purse strings are loosened; it was the other two colleges, she said, that needed more fundiing. We spent a little time interacting with some of the children, and looking arond the campus, which is quite a large one.

And the connection with the oil slick post?

Well, as we were getting back into the car, I noticed the puddle with the oil (or kerosene) slick, and took a photo of another instance where good things like this beautiful abstract pattern take birth in, and because of, the filth that often surrounds us…