When Feeling Found a Form
Some ideas stay soft until someone, or something, gives them an edge.
Srikanth and Chitra had introduced us to Snehalaya earlier, but it was the 2019 visit that made it real. I had carried the question — what would it look like to be close at hand, to do something meaningful near Appa — for two years by then. Walking through Snehalaya is where that question stopped being abstract.
Dr. Girish Kulkarni and his team gave us a full day. We walked through the orphanage. We visited the school — a full boarding school, built specifically for the children of women Girish has worked to rehabilitate from prostitution. A place that says: whatever your mother's circumstances, your story can be different. And then we stepped into the dining hall — a room built from donations that had poured in after Snehalaya was featured on Satyamev Jayate. Aamir Khan had told their story on national television, and people had responded. What that response built was this: a room where children sit down to eat every day. Standing in it, I felt the distance collapse between a story told and a life changed. Between someone deciding to give and something real existing in the world.
We spent time at the greenhouse — run by families of HIV positive patients building a livelihood with quiet dignity. We saw the Paithani weaving center, staffed by women finding economic ground under their feet. Each space was its own world, each with its own logic of care.
And then there was the moment I didn't anticipate. A baby at the orphanage was being placed into her permanent home that day. Girish offered me the chance to hand her to her new parents. I did.
There are experiences you process later, sometimes much later. That was one of them.
In conversation with Girish I tried to articulate what I was circling — how does one actually begin this kind of work? How do you move from caring about something to being useful to it? He listened, and then he said something that cut through cleanly: to really get answers to those questions, you need to be immersed in this space. Not visiting. Not observing from a distance. In it.
That was the first time the word internship entered this story. Not from me — from someone who had built something real and knew what real engagement required.
I left Snehalaya that day with the soft intention of 2017 hardened into something I could almost hold — a plan, or at least the shape of one.
