Our journey.

Where does it start from!

I can't pin-point a single day or a single incident which can be showed as the start of our journey. Rather it was a collection of incidents which triggered the birth of AID Kolkata. I remember a night when I was on a bus to my home. A child, may be 9/10 years old, was singing and dancing with some bihari and oria filmy songs and after the performance she was asking for money. This kind of scenes is very frequent in the roads of Kolkata. I was looking at the girl. Mal-nutritioned, wearing dirty, torn up frock, with dirty disheveled hair - her voice was broken - apparently from all the performances she has given through the whole day and some people were really enjoying her singing and dancing. They were asking for more of it. And when she started asking for money every one started avoiding her, shooing her.

That week I finished reading "Bitter Chocolate" by Pinky Virani. It is about child sexual abuse in India. I was really feeling so much helpless, I did not and could not do any thing for that girl and for others like her, who never get the taste of a normal childhood starting right from the time they can see and understand the world around. Returning home I called Rahul Chauhan and told him that I wanted to do something. He was not very sure whether we could do justice to the cause but his sister Juhita called me the moment she heard about this and told me " bhai jo bhi kahe, main aapke sath hu" - i guess from that day onwards our journey started.

I contacted Anirban, who is an active volunteer and volunteer coordinator of AID Delhi. And he helped us from the day i contacted him. Rahul and I visited Parivaar at Thakurpukur, we talked to Mr. Sujit Sinha of Swanirvar, we met Somnathda who is a volunteer of AID Boston, we talked to Mr. Ashis Roy of Tomorrow's Foundation.

I talked to some of my friends and juniors - Sourasis, Indraneel, Debadeep, Abhik, Sreyoshi, and all of them readily agreed to volunteer. Rahul talked to some of his frineds - Tanwi, Subhra, Rimi they also agreed to volunteer. Then Devi from AID India, Anirban, Somenda of AID Delhi, Somnathda also linked us with some new people - Ritesh, Debabrata, Sujit. And through them we met other people - Vishnu, Mithun. I hope this list goes on and on and we can be successful in completing one of our goals - Creating and Spreading Awareness.

- Satabdi.