India Helps at the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon

Did you spot us around?
(From left, Aparna Nair, Sumita Naik, Bala, Priyanka Chaturvedi and Rohini Haldea)

(Our brave men on hire who held up our banners for tired runners to glance at.)
It was the first major event of the New Year Mumbai city was seeing, and India Helps was there. In a small way.

So there were our brave lasses, and one brave lad, braving the heat and the crowd to spread the message, hand out leaflets, put up banners and get some visibility for the group as well as cheer our runners, Nihaas, kbpm, Orange Jammies and Parul.

Here's what Rohini wrote about her experience yesterday.

Will just write a quick update on what happened:

Priyanka, her husband Vickram, Suma, Aparna, Bala and I all met up at Churchgate station and made our way across to Azad Maidan. We fumbled around a bit to arrive at a good place to stand with the banners and leaflets. We finally decided the Finish line was the best place. Though even there, we realised that the runners had other priorities just then, like quenching their thirst and taking photographs. So we moved up just beyond the refreshment counter and got a much more positive response.

We managed to get our banners up, by hook or by crook. The first was given off to two guys standing on the road divider who agreed to hold it up in return for some small compensation. Another one, we put on the divider just where we were standing, held in place by two boulders. And used safety pins to pin the last one on a black fabric screen on the other side of the road.

We gave away all the leaflets we had on us and most people were happy to take one, though the odd exceptions did refuse. We did get quite a few queries on what we were doing over at Indiahelps and what kind of help we were looking for.

Here's hoping that today's efforts traslate into more interest and contributors (financial and otherwise) for India Helps...

So, if you did spot us there, I do hope you stopped by to say hello!