“The pain of hunger is said to be severe. If we wish to live as human beings, let us rise above even this pain.” – Mahatma Gandhi
As a child on a farm in Nagpur, I always thought that our cows were luckier than I was. While I could barely feed myself, they had someone feeding them grass everyday. I come from a very poor family and even having two meals a day was a burden. To add to this, our region suffered severe floods in 1998 causing large scale damage and several deaths. Fortunately, we survived the floods but all our property and harvests were destroyed.
Overnight, we had to sell what little we had left and move to Nizamabad to find an alternative livelihood. I began to work as a daily wager in hotels, construction sites and even as a lorry cleaner when I was only 5 years old.
People say there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. I found that light in the form of social reformer Shrimati Hemalata Lavanam. She was the founder of Samskar Ashram Vidyalayam, an ashram that educates underprivileged children free of cost. One day as I was working at a construction site, a volunteer from the ashram spotted me and took me in. The school had children from various underprivileged backgrounds, even children of devadasis, and we all grew up together.
It was then that I learnt about the Champaran Satyagraha movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. His unwavering determination to fight against exploitation and injustice inspired me and I was awestruck by his dedicated work for the social and cultural upliftment of people. His life and work for underprivileged people in line with the haunting memories of my childhood propelled me to do something substantial for the poor and the starving.
Once my financial situation had stabilized a little, I took up a job in a catering business. It was here that I saw the amount of food that gets wasted every day. When I had just moved to Hyderabad, I remember sleeping on the platform with not a morsel of food in my mouth and a rumbling belly. It was a painfully fresh memory and I knew I had to do everything I could to prevent other children from experiencing the same struggle.
It was this incentive that led me to found an organization in 2012 called Don’t Waste Food. Along with some friends, I would carry large gunny bags collecting unwanted food from around the city. We would then distribute this food among the underprivileged. What started off as a small movement has now gained so much momentum. As of now, with the help of various volunteers, we feed anywhere between 500 and 2000 people each day. The movement has now spread to cities like Hyderabad, Rajamundry, Delhi, Rohtak and Dehradun.
Under Konnect Hope, another organization that I co-founded, we have been donating PPE kits to Osmania Hospital, Gandhi Hospital, Niloufer Hospital, and a few others too. The latest task I have undertaken is performing the last rites for people who have died of COVID. Many of them have been rejected by their own family members and have nobody to perform their ceremonies for them.
When I look around and see what we have created now, I know that we are making a difference. That is all that matters, for one less child to go to sleep hungry at night.”
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