So we’re only a few weeks away from the road trip we’re all really excited about, and this is as good a time as any to look back on how we got here.

For me, it almost ended before it started. I stumbled upon the grassroutes site, and immediately knew I just had to apply for the fellowship, but couldnt think of anyone who might be interested enough to take the time off work. So I kind of gave up on it, and only mentioned it in passing to a friend who was in Chicago at that time. She however was incredibly excited and told me she’ld love to do it. She (Rashmi) was getting back to India in a bit, but would still be in Pune, while I was in Bangalore. Plus we needed more people. And the mini campaign would be tough to pull off, as would getting leave sanctioned if we actually got through.

There were a dozen things that could bring our plan crashing down, but there was one thing driving us- we wanted to do this. So Rashmi got on board a couple of her friends, one a doctor (Husain), and the other a developmental worker (Maya).

Then we had this phase where a bunch of people who knew only one person in common were thrown together, over a challenging application process. We were all based in different cities, but three of us were meeting in Bangalore over the three day Good Friday weekend, so that was when we had to carry out the campaign. It was a new experience to boot, and in the beginning we were kind of groping in the dark. To make it worse, our first two ideas for campaigns fell flat. Our initial idea was to create a documentary on farmer suicides by meeting survivors of suicide attempts and their families and getting to know their story, but we just couldnt find records of any recent cases in Karnataka. Which was a great thing, but we needed a different campaign idea, and soon! Then, we thought of a voter awareness campaign, but when we went out, camera in hand to talk to people about the two, we found as many people knew about elections as the IPL, if not more!

So with time running out, we had to come up with a different campaign, and we finally settled on telling people to conserve electricity by showing them how their efforts actually mattered. But even after carrying out the campaign, we were still several conference calls away from filling out our forms, and after about three frenzied weeks, we completed the application process.

Looking back, it has been a great experience, to work towards ’social change’, something I have not done before, in a team where I started off knowing only the one person! But what makes it all the more sweeter now is knowing the best part is yet to come..