CEO Naghma Mulla's Letter - Annual Report 2025-26
Us millennials all have a native place. Mera gaon. Memories of lazy afternoons, sweet nothings with other kids, half of whom were related to us through relations we never quite understood. Not that it mattered. All you had to know was how to play, and you were in.
It Takes a Village.
Us millennials all have a native place. Mera gaon. Memories of lazy afternoons, sweet nothings with other kids, half of whom were related to us through relations we never quite understood. Not that it mattered. All you had to know was how to play, and you were in.
Elders concerned with everyone's children. The young running wild, watched over by no one in particular and everyone at once. My village was my safe place.
Now it stays romanticised, held together by selective memories of good times. We want to believe we made those memories ourselves. But we didn't, and definitely not alone. It was every member of a vast community of aunties and uncles and chachas and buas whose names we didn't even remember. We had no names either. We were somebody's child and so we were to be worried about. That's all it took.
My home, my land, my people, my country. Why do we call her our motherland?
I think of my own mother. My only source of truly unconditional love. And I wonder, have I ever managed to return it to her the same way she gave it to me?
Our mother is the most pedestalised presence in our lives, our one place of rest. And yet she is also the person we take most for granted, because we know she will be there. A little more worn out each time we see her. Perhaps hurt by something we did and never noticed. But there.
It makes sense, then. Our land, our motherland, we know she is there too. More depleted each year, more damaged each time we look closely, torn at by what we have done to her. But there. Waiting, the way mothers wait.
Then I think of my own children. And I feel different. Not the quiet debt of a child to a mother, but the rush of a parent toward a child.
We don't take our children for granted. We worry. We fuss. We protect.
It dawned upon me then… the village, my place, my land, should not be my mother. When I think of this village as my child, I see it will bear the fruit of the labour I put into it. It will grow whatever love I plant in it or will spread what venom I choose to harvest in it.
No child should be raised by one parent alone. Long before I understood what raising a child even meant, I felt it mould me by the many people without asking for anything in return.
So maybe that is the debt that comes due now. Not to be paid once, but tended to the way a village tends to its own: through the hundreds of small NGOs holding up communities in places most of us have forgotten how to pronounce; through choosing our role as financiers of difficult solutions, with the same large-heartedness and vigilance as a village elder; through caring by sponsoring what is needed, not what will give us the most satisfaction.
This annual report attempts to spotlight the village, and the village is not merely our work, our NGOs, our funders and our organisational report card. The village is all of us and it will grow from whatever each of us puts into it. It will carry, quietly and for a long time, whatever each of us fails to give it.
A child never asks if you meant to raise it well. It simply becomes what you gave it. This year, I want us to think about what we are giving ours.
Naghma Mulla
CEO, EdelGive Foundation