The road into the village seemed to get narrower as we went deeper into it. The houses stood close to one another, people moved about their everyday work, and every now and then someone would stop to look at us as we passed. It was the kind of place where an unfamiliar vehicle or a group of visitors was enough to attract a little attention.
We were not arriving for a large event. There was no stage waiting for us, no large gathering and no elaborate arrangement. We were simply making our way to a village school.
When we reached the school, the lunch interval was still going on. The place was full of energy. Children who had finished their lunch were running around the grounds, calling out to one another, chasing each other between the classrooms and turning every available corner into a place to play. Some were still eating, some were washing their hands, while others had already started their games. The teachers had stepped away from their classroom routine and were sitting together, taking a little rest before the next session began.
We stood around for a while and began discussing the arrangements with one of the teachers. During the conversation, he mentioned something that immediately caught our attention.
“We have a projector,” he told us.
That was useful. We had films with us and were hoping to show them during the programme. A projector meant that we could do more than simply stand in front of the students and talk.
Then, almost casually, the teacher added that there was one problem.
They had a projector, but they did not have a screen.
We looked around the room. The projector was there. The wall was there. The audience would soon be there. But there was nowhere to put the picture.
It was such a small problem that it almost felt funny. We had travelled all the way to a remote village carrying films and awareness material, and now the screening seemed to depend on finding something to use as a screen.
So we went out looking.
We came back with four large sheets of chart paper. We joined them together and fixed them to the wall as carefully as we could. They were never meant to be a projection screen, but there was little reason to worry about appearances. We just needed something that would hold the picture.
When the projector was switched on, the image appeared.
The children who had been running around during the lunch break gradually settled down. The teachers joined them. The room became quieter as the film began. The picture was being projected onto four sheets of chart paper fixed to a wall, but nobody seemed particularly concerned about what the screen was made of. They had come to watch, and the four sheets were enough.
That small incident stayed with us because it captured something we had begun to understand through our work outside the cities. We would arrive somewhere with a plan and discover that something we had assumed would be available simply wasn’t there. Sometimes the answer was easy. You found four sheets of paper, put them together and carried on. At other times, the missing piece was much harder to replace.
We had experienced that even in much more organised places.
Once, we were invited to a corporate house to give a presentation on eye-donation awareness. Before the presentation, there had been several emails about the pledge form. They wanted us to provide one, while we kept explaining why we did not believe that a form should become the centre of an awareness programme. We argued about it through several exchanges, but eventually we had to provide the form.
When we gave the presentation, however, we explained why we had been reluctant to make the form central to the programme.
A person can sign a pledge today and still leave their family completely unprepared for the day when that pledge actually matters. What matters more is understanding. If someone genuinely understands eye donation, they can explain their wishes to their family and help them know what to do when a death occurs at home. They can understand whom to contact and why the response needs to be quick.
A form can record a wish, but it cannot have that conversation with a family years later.
Then came another opportunity. Pantaloon was ready to give us space in one of its showrooms for fifteen days to promote eye donation. It seemed like an excellent opportunity. We would have a visible space in a busy retail environment where people could encounter the subject during their normal shopping.
But when we started working out how to use that opportunity properly, another problem appeared. We needed to connect with eye banks or cornea-retrieval centres in around fifteen cities. If someone saw the campaign and wanted to know what to do next, there needed to be someone locally who could respond.
We tried to make those connections, but we could not establish the network we needed in time. The space was available, but the network around it was not. So the opportunity passed.
That was another lesson for us. Sometimes the missing thing is not a screen that can be replaced with four sheets of paper. Sometimes it is an entire network.
And the more closely we worked in eye donation, the more complicated some of the realities became.
Corneal transplantation was one of them.
From the outside, the idea seems straightforward. Someone who is blind because of a corneal problem may receive a transplant and potentially regain useful vision. A person who has depended on someone else for many everyday activities may become more independent, move around more freely, perform tasks themselves, learn new skills and perhaps eventually find a way to earn.
We have always believed that something is better than nothing.
But people living with blindness do not always look at transplantation from the same distance as someone discussing it from outside. We encountered blind people who were hesitant about corneal transplantation because they depended on benefits available to them as persons with blindness. Some worried that if a transplant restored useful vision in one eye, they might no longer qualify for those benefits. Their hesitation was not necessarily about refusing sight. They were thinking about what might happen to the rest of their lives if their circumstances changed.
There were other practical difficulties too. Someone who had lived for years without sight had already built an entire way of living around blindness. If useful vision returned, even partially, they might have to learn many things again. In some cases, the appearance of the eye or face had also been affected by the underlying condition. Restoring sight could therefore mean starting another part of life rather than simply switching the lights back on.
These were realities that did not fit neatly into an eye-donation poster.
And perhaps that was one reason we eventually began thinking about another gap we had seen across India: the lack of creative promotional material around eye donation.
There was government material, and there were individual efforts here and there, but very little that offered fresh ways of communicating the subject. We kept thinking about what could be done through a short film, an audio jingle or a product design. Why should eye donation always have to be communicated through the same poster or pledge form?
That thinking eventually became the Drishti Creative Contest, which invited people to create short films, audio jingles and product designs to promote eye donation. We wanted people not simply to receive a message from an organisation, but to think about the subject themselves and find their own creative way of making someone else stop and think.
Looking back, those four sheets of chart paper seem almost symbolic of the work itself.
In that village, the teacher had a projector but no screen. We found four sheets and carried on. The corporate house had the audience and the presentation, but we had to argue about the form. Pantaloon had the space, but we could not build the network needed to use it. And with corneal transplantation, the possibility of restoring sight existed, but the human reality around that possibility was far more complicated than any campaign slogan could explain.
The work kept teaching us the same thing in different ways: what looks simple from outside can become very complicated when you stand close enough to see the people inside it.