We bought three large umbrellas.
They were not for the rain.
It was evening, and the market was beginning to come alive. People were coming out to shop, families were moving through the crowded streets, and the smell of street food was spreading through the air. The lane beside us was particularly busy, with people stopping to eat, talking over plates of food and moving in and out of the shops.
That was where we put the umbrellas.
Three large umbrellas stood along the roadside, right beside the street-food lane. We had removed their covers and turned the frames into makeshift exhibition structures. Ropes ran across them, and posters were hung from every possible space. Between the three umbrellas, hundreds of posters were hanging above the heads of people who had come to shop or eat.
It must have looked rather strange. People had come for chaat, snacks and shopping, and suddenly there was an exhibition about eye donation standing in their path.
Some people slowed down because the umbrellas caught their attention. Others stopped to see what all the posters were about. A few came closer and began reading. People stood beneath the umbrellas while the evening crowd continued moving around them, the noise of the market and the calls from the food stalls carrying on as usual.
There was no stage, no microphone and no formal invitation. The exhibition was simply there, waiting for people to notice it.
And then one woman came towards us with a very different purpose.
“Where is the form?”
She had not come simply to look at the posters. She wanted to donate her eyes.
At first, that sounded like exactly what we had hoped the exhibition might achieve. Someone had seen the message and wanted to act. But when we began explaining what eye donation actually involved, the conversation changed.
A form, we explained, was only one part of the process. Her family needed to know about her wish. After her death, they would have to contact the appropriate people quickly. The donation could not depend only on a form lying somewhere in a drawer.
She became upset and eventually left with the people who had come with her.
We stood there watching her disappear into the evening crowd.
It was an uncomfortable moment. Here was someone who had come to an eye-donation exhibition wanting to donate, yet when we moved beyond the form and started talking about what would actually have to happen, the conversation broke down.
But perhaps our own journey with eye donation had begun with something much simpler.
One of the first eye-donation awareness activities we undertook was at an NCC camp. There was no elaborate campaign behind it. We created a poster and released it there, using the opportunity to put the subject in front of young people who might otherwise never have thought about it.
That first poster was only a beginning.
Over the years, we kept looking for ways to talk about eye donation. We went to different places, spoke to people, created awareness material and tried different ways of getting the message beyond the usual meetings and lectures.
And somewhere along the way, we began noticing something that bothered us.
India had organisations working on eye donation. Government agencies had their own publicity material. Here and there, individual organisations had created something for their own campaigns. But when we looked for creative, contemporary promotional material that could actually be used to communicate eye donation in different ways, there was remarkably little.
There were plenty of messages asking people to donate their eyes.
There were far fewer things that made people stop and think about why they should.
We kept coming across the same problem: if someone wanted to make a short film about eye donation, where would they find one? If someone wanted an audio jingle, a creative campaign, an illustration or a product design that could carry the message into everyday life, what would they use?
Most of the available material was either government publicity or isolated efforts created for a particular campaign.
The gap was not simply a lack of information.
It was a lack of creative language for the subject.
That was where the idea of the Drishti Creative Contest began.
Instead of asking people only to pledge their eyes, we asked them to create something that could make someone else think about eye donation. The contest was not limited to posters. We invited short films, audio jingles and product designs, along with other creative approaches that could be used to promote eye donation.
The idea was simple: perhaps the country did not need another organisation telling people to donate their eyes. Perhaps it needed more people creating better ways of talking about why eye donation mattered.
A short film could reach someone who would never attend an awareness meeting. An audio jingle could travel where a poster could not. A product could carry the message into someone’s home or workplace. A creative idea could make a familiar subject feel unfamiliar again.
The contest became our attempt to fill a gap we had experienced ourselves.
And that brings us back to the woman beneath the umbrellas.
Because even after years of awareness work, even after posters, campaigns and creative efforts, that evening taught us something else.
We had been standing beside hundreds of posters, and a woman had walked up asking for a form.
She wanted to do something good. There was no question about her intention.
But she had not necessarily understood what the intention required.
That distinction mattered.
Eye donation could not simply become a collection of signatures. A pledge could begin the conversation, but it could not finish it.
The family had to know.
The process had to be understood.
The intention had to survive the moment when the person who made it was no longer there to explain it.
The creative work, the exhibitions, the films, the jingles and the posters were all different ways of reaching that first moment of understanding.
And perhaps that was why the three umbrellas mattered more than they appeared to.
They were not just an exhibition structure.
They were a way of taking the conversation to people who had not come looking for it.
They stood beside a street-food lane while people ate, shopped, talked and passed by. Some stopped for a poster. Some stopped because the umbrellas looked unusual. Some stayed long enough to read. Others walked away.
We could not control what each person would think.
We could only create the opportunity to think.
Looking back, the journey from that first poster at an NCC camp to hundreds of posters hanging from three umbrellas, and then to films, audio jingles and creative products, was never really about collecting material.
It was about searching for better ways to make people stop.
Because sometimes awareness does not begin with a form.
It begins with a poster.
A strange-looking umbrella in the middle of a crowded market.
A short film that makes someone uncomfortable.
A voice coming through an audio jingle.
Or simply a question that makes someone pause long enough to think:
What would I want my family to do when I am no longer here to tell them?