One day Street Smart was settled at Gandhi Park as usual. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping and the kids were engrossed in their art, save for the occasional fights and arguments. Then a reporter descended around the happy little group and started to ask questions about what was going on.

It was a nice chat..

The next day, another group of reporters came in and this was the day that a few volunteers from a very prominent boarding school, led by their teacher came in to help at Street Smart. The reporters found all of this very interesting and came back the next day too, asking about the involvement of the boarding school and also about other influential people associated with the project.

Slowly, it became a routine for somebody or the other from the press to come in every day- sometimes with those scary looking microphones and cameras, at other times with serious photography equipments and almost everyday with little writing pads and pens.

With somebody always required from the team to talk to them and patiently explain that it was not about names or pictures of the people running the project, but about the children and their issues there was more disruption during the program than any support from the media people.

They would ask the kids to move around and be seated in a way that they thought would make for a great picture! This started to seriously bother everybody involved in the project and despite several attempts to explain and reason with the scribes, they continued to come down almost everyday and interrupt Street Smart.

This rather unexciting story will end with the declaration that for the above reasons, we are now preparing a press release about the Street Smart program!