After a couple of days during which we were only informally chatting with people, and mostly walking all around Ranikhet, this was the day we were supposed to go meet people working for Grassroots.
A description of the Grassroots office would be incomplete without a mention of the steps that lead you there. Located near the famous Khalika temple, you step off the road and follow a flight of stairs to the office and pickle factory. On your way down you might not really notice that you’re climbing down over a …

Sunday are always lazy, uneventful days, but not this Sunday. With a whole day off, we planned to take in as much of the sights around town like good tourists do.
Our host family recommended we head into town through a jungle detour which turned out to be as much fun as it sounded. Luckily for us city people, there was a clear-cut path, which was easy enough to make our way through. But the lack of trees meant no shade, so the sun boiled down on us. We finally …

The Rajdhani journey from Mumbai to Delhi was was again an uneventful trip, because this time too, everyone was fast asleep. Rashmi was awake for a total of four hours. None of us could beat that, but it was not for want of effort. I think it was the AC and the food. We were served something or the other every now and then. The train was two hours late, and we reached Nizamuddin at only eight thirty in the evening. We had to catch a taxi to get to …

We visited the Pan Himalayan Grassroots office soon after we reached here on Saturday. Its about four kilometres downhill from where we live.  The office is a nestled against the slope of the hill. There were a hundred and eighteen steps down from the road to the office, the significance of which we realised only on the way up.

The office is a  collection of five buildings, each at different levels against the hill. The administrative office is a three storey building housing, spacious and well-lit with nice large rooms. There’s …

“A journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step” - Chinese proverb
Our journey started with one person missing the train!
Maya, Susa and I were going to catch the Udayan Express to Mumbai at 8:10 on the 17th.  Despite being warned to leave home by 6:45, I was finally out at 7:10. I caught a public bus, thinking it doesn’t really matter what mode of transport you use in Bangalore anymore. I got off at Majestic at 7:45, and  had to cross the road to reach the railway station. The …

I’ld have liked to say, that after an eternity of waiting, the roadtrip is about to begin, but it hasnt really felt like a long time. The projects we were given post selection kept us occupied, and before we knew it, the orientation happened. So it only feels like a couple of weeks back that we got the GR fellowship, while its actually more like two months!
So, without much warning, the day of departure was upon us. Due to some massive work pressure, I wasnt sure if I could join …

At six fifteen in the morning I get a call from Rashmi “we need to finish the team presentation. Maya and I are leaving for IIM now. We’ll meet you there at seven.”
Seven?!?!
Susa and I met at the gate, and after a few wrong turns in the sprawling maze of vegetation and stone that the IIM campus is we reached the NSR-GIV centre. Forty-five minutes late though.
The ladies were sweet about it though.
After lots of hair-pulling about colours, bubbles, arrows and whether the boxes should have smooth or round corners, …

As part of the fellowship, we were required to visit a change-maker in the neighbourhood, so Susa and I decided to visit Premaanjali, a home for underprivileged children in J.P. Nagar, Bangalore.
Premaanjali was founded in 1988 by the Premaanjali trust led by Mr. Balakrishna Hegde. They moved to their current premises in J.P. Nagar in 1991. My family shifted into the same locality a few houses down the road in 1992, and we’ve been in contact ever since. As kids we used to collect old newspapers and give …

This is my take on the campaign – on what I learned from it. They’re more about our thinking, rather than what we did or didn’t do.
We really underestimated how difficult it was to make a video. We thought we could walk out, record whatever we want, cut and paste the clips and hey presto - our video would be ready. Not that simple, as we eventually found out. None of us had any prior experience with movie making. Secondly, we hadn’t considered things like lighting, backgrounds, and …

This was our plan:

Zero in on an issue that we wanted to create awareness about
Identify our target audience
Find effective and creative ways in which to engage our audience and put our point across
Measure the impact created

 
I think we spent the most time brainstorming. This went on for a couple of weeks; we’d have long conversations every night, but somehow couldn’t manage to focus on any particular issue. We discussed a host of ideas – religious issues and identity, violence against women, education for the less privileged, loss of …