The First Steps

This is the first post. This blog will have just about everything about FOR.

What’s my earliest recollection about FOR?

It all started off on a bright morning while i was chatting with my school friend (Neeraja).It was nice conversation; as most conversations are. Suddenly, she buzzed me with this idea of starting an NGO called Fist Of Rice. Instantly, whole volumes of information on how to start and run an NGO came to me. Intuitively, I knew that I was destined to be a part of the revolutionary step. This was the missing piece in the big jigsaw of my experiences. Oh, what a moment! No, I am joking: P

I was just getting to know her virtually -we lived in different continents of the same school.- Long hours of chat, soon I was running short of words against her constant prattle. After all that seconds of googling in my cerebrum, I did not have many search results. Sensing our common inclination to matters of social concern, I decided to forward into the chat space, on a casual note, my not so casual dream of fighting for the hungry. Incidentally -there are no accidents in life- she had the fuel (in crude form) for my dream. An IDEA!
Hunger was one topic that does not exhaust me (or my amazing FOR friends); and we worked more on the idea. When two people share a dream it is beautiful but when more do it is a miracle. The idea was passed through several filters, refined and charted. More e-mails, more chats, my friends Dipin, Gurumoorthy, MSR (to mention a few) involved themselves in the initial perception.

Here's an extract from the initial mail:

"Yesterday while talking to a school friend I came across an idea that seems good.

Consider a well to do school, on a premeditated day.
Each kid brings 1 fistful of rice (nothing compared to what we waste) to school and puts it in a common storage barrel. At the end of the day we have a barrel overflowing with rice(hopefully)
Imagine if all the kids across the country did it on various days of the month and we had an efficient system to mobilise the grain

Essentially we collect the grain,

find a place to cook it, (an orphanage to begin with),
and distribute it to the hungry..

Since it brings about a sense of moral and social responsibility in students...earning the support of teachers and parents would not be of much concern."

So, those were pretty much the earliest days of FOR. We watched the system work, helped it to place its first footsteps, four months have passed, it can do much more than a four month old baby, it can run!